ArticleJournal of experimental psychology. General2019
"Memory compression" effects in visual working memory are contingent on explicit long-term memory.
Article in Journal of experimental psychology. General, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Revisiting Hebb: The Mechanisms of Repetition Learning.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2026Article
- Contributions from Long-Term Memory Explain Superior Visual Working Memory Performance with Meaningful Objects.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Contributions from Long-Term Memory Explain Superior Visual Working Memory Performance with Meaningful Objects.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Working memory capacity and self-cues: Consistent benefits in children and adults.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2025Article
- The Flexibility of Working Memory in Drawing on Episodic Long-Term Memory Representations in Serial Recall.Journal of cognition · 2025Article
- Constraints on multi-item working memory access: performance costs and retrieval dynamics.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- The information exchange between working memory and long-term memory.Memory & cognition · 2024Article
- Behavioral signatures of the rapid recruitment of long-term memory to overcome working memory capacity limits.Memory & cognition · 2024Article
- Can compression take place in working memory without a central contribution of long-term memory?Memory & cognition · 2024Article
- Proactive interference of visual working memory chunks implicates long-term memory.Memory & cognition · 2024Article
- Representation and computation in visual working memory.Nature human behaviour · 2024Review
- Mapping visual working memory models to a theoretical framework.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Review
- Repetition learning is neither a continuous nor an implicit process.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Long-term memory guides resource allocation in working memory.Scientific reports · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
Brady, Konkle, and Alvarez (2009) argued that statistical learning boosts the number of colors that can be held online in visual working memory (WM). They showed that when specific colors are consistently paired together in a WM task, subjects can take optimal advantage of these regularities to recall more colors, an effect they labeled memory compression. They proposed that memory compression is a product of visual statistical learning, an automatic apprehension of statistical regularities that has been shown in prior work to be disconnected from explicit learning. If statistical learning enables an expansion of the number of individuated representations in visual WM, it would require revision of virtually all models of capacity in this online memory system. That said, this provocative claim is inconsistent with multiple studies that have found no improvement in WM performance following numerous repetitions of specific sample displays (e.g., Logie, Brockmole, & Vandenbroucke, 2009; Olson & Jiang, 2004). Here, we replicate the Brady et al. (2009) findings but show that memory compression effects were restricted to subjects who had perfect explicit recall of the color pairs at the end of the study, suggesting that statistical regularities boosted performance by enabling contributions from long-term memory. Thus, while memory compression effects provide an interesting example of the tight collaboration between online and offline memory representations, they do not provide evidence that statistical regularities can augment the number of individuated representations that can be concurrently stored in visual WM. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
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