September 2024
Volume 24, Issue 10
Open Access
Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting Abstract  |   September 2024
The brain knows more is stored in visual long-term memory than we can report
Author Affiliations & Notes
  • Geoffrey Woodman
    Vanderbilt University
  • Chong Zhao
    University of Chicago
  • Keisuke Fukuda
    University of Toronto Mississauga & University of Toronto
  • Footnotes
    Acknowledgements  Grants were provided by the National Science Foundation (BCS-2147064), and NEI (P30-EY08126 and T32-EY007135).
Journal of Vision September 2024, Vol.24, 420. doi:https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.24.10.420
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      Geoffrey Woodman, Chong Zhao, Keisuke Fukuda; The brain knows more is stored in visual long-term memory than we can report. Journal of Vision 2024;24(10):420. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.24.10.420.

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      © ARVO (1962-2015); The Authors (2016-present)

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Abstract

If your visual long-term memory storage is virtually perfect, then when you happened to press the wrong button during a visual recognition memory experiment you would detect that motor error as such. That is, your brain should know when you are about to commit an error during a visual long-term memory experiment, even before you press the button. This is exactly the prediction we tested in this study. Electroencephalograms were recorded from 50 subjects who viewed 500 photographs of real-world objects for a subsequent recognition memory test in which the confidence of their judgments were also collected. Here we show that subjects’ brains knew they were making mistakes during the recognition memory test at the time of button press, indicating that sufficient memory representations were available to executive control mechanisms to know that errors were being committed. Our findings show that people's choice behavior in visual long-term memory experiments misses information that is available to other high-level mechanisms of the brain.

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