{"id":43864,"date":"2020-04-28T14:52:53","date_gmt":"2020-04-28T12:52:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aktuelles.uni-frankfurt.de\/?p=43864"},"modified":"2023-02-22T16:11:08","modified_gmt":"2023-02-22T15:11:08","slug":"psychologists-at-goethe-university-research-the-short-term-memory-of-visual-impressions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aktuelles.uni-frankfurt.de\/en\/english\/psychologists-at-goethe-university-research-the-short-term-memory-of-visual-impressions\/","title":{"rendered":"Psychologists at Goethe University research the short-term memory of visual impressions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>When we look at the same object in quick succession, our second glance\nalways reflects a slightly falsified image of the object. Guided by various\nobject characteristics such as motion direction, colour and spatial position, our\nshort-term memory makes systematic mistakes. Apparently, these mistakes help us\nto stabilise the continually changing impressions of our environment. This has\nbeen discovered by scientists at the Institute of Medical Psychology at Goethe\nUniversity. (Nature Communications, DOI 10.1038\/s41467-020-15874-w)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We learned it as children: to cross the street in exemplary fashion, we\nmust first look to the left, then to the right, and finally once more to the\nleft. If we see a car and a cyclist approaching when we first look to the left,\nthis information is stored in our short-term memory. During the second glance\nto the left, our short-term memory reports: bicycle and car were there before,\nthey are the same ones, they are still far enough away. We cross the street\nsafely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is, however, not at all true. Our short-term memory deceives us.\nWhen looking to the left the second time, our eyes see something completely\ndifferent: the bicycle and the car do not have the same colour anymore because\nthey are just now passing through the shadow of a tree, they are no longer in\nthe same location, and the car is perhaps moving more slowly. The fact that we\nnonetheless immediately recognise the bicycle and the car is due to the fact\nthat the memory of the first leftward look biases the second one. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Scientists at Goethe University, led by psychologist Christoph Bledowski\nand doctoral student Cora Fischer reconstructed the traffic situation \u2013 very\nabstractly \u2013 in the laboratory: student participants were told to remember the motion\ndirection of green or red dots moving across a monitor. During each trial, the\ntest person saw two moving dot fields in short succession and had to\nsubsequently report the motion direction of one of these dot fields. In\nadditional tests, both dot fields were shown simultaneously next to each other.\nThe test persons all completed numerous successive trials. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Frankfurt scientists were very interested in the mistakes made by\nthe test persons and how these mistakes were systematically connected in\nsuccessive trials. If for example the observed dots moved in the direction of 10\ndegrees and in the following trial in the direction of 20 degrees, most people\nreported 16 to 18 degrees for the second trial. However, if 0 degrees were\ncorrect for the following trial, they reported 2 to 4 degrees for the second\ntrial. The direction of the previous trial therefore distorted the perception\nof the following one \u2013 \u201cnot very much, but systematically,\u201d says Christoph\nBledowski. He and his team extended previous studies by investigating the\ninfluence of contextual information of the dot fields like colour, spatial\nposition (right or left) and sequence (shown first or second). \u201cIn this way we\nmore closely approximate real situations, in which we acquire different types\nof visual information from objects,\u201d Bledowski explains. This contextual\ninformation, especially space and sequence, contribute significantly to the distortion\nof successive perception in short-term memory. First author Cora Fischer says:\n\u201cThe contextual information helps us to differentiate among different objects\nand consequently to integrate information of the same object through time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What does this mean for our traffic situation? \u201cInitially, it doesn\u2019t\nsound good if our short-term memory reflects something different from what we\nphysically see,\u201d says Bledowski. \u201cBut if our short-term memory were unable to\ndo this, we would see a completely new traffic situation when we looked to the\nleft a second time. That would be quite confusing, because a different car and\na different cyclist would have suddenly appeared out of nowhere. The slight \u2018blurring\u2019\nof our perception by memory ultimately leads us to perceive our environment,\nwhose appearance is constantly changing due to motion and light changes, as stable.\nIn this process, the current perception of the car, for example, is only\naffected by the previous perception of the car, but not by the perception of\nthe cyclist.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-background has-very-light-gray-background-color\"><strong>Publication:\n<\/strong>Context information\nsupports serial dependence of multiple visual objects across memory episodes.\nCora Fischer, Stefan Czoschke, Benjamin Peters, Benjamin Rahm, Jochen Kaiser,\nChristoph Bledowski.&nbsp; Nat. Commun. 11, 1932\n(2020). <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1038\/s41467-020-15874-w\">https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1038\/s41467-020-15874-w<\/a><strong><\/strong><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When we look at the same object in quick succession, our second glance always reflects a slightly falsified image of the object. Guided by various object characteristics such as motion [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[126,261,150],"tags":[232],"post_folder":[],"class_list":["post-43864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-in-brief","category-news-in-brief","tag-psychology"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Psychologists at Goethe University research the short-term memory of visual impressions | Aktuelles aus der Goethe-Universit\u00e4t Frankfurt<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/aktuelles.uni-frankfurt.de\/en\/english\/psychologists-at-goethe-university-research-the-short-term-memory-of-visual-impressions\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Psychologists at Goethe University research the short-term memory of visual impressions | Aktuelles aus der Goethe-Universit\u00e4t Frankfurt\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"When we look at the same object in quick succession, our second glance always reflects a slightly falsified image of the object. 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