Person: Suchow, Jordan
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Suchow
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Suchow, Jordan
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Publication Modeling Visual Working Memory with the MemToolbox(Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO), 2013) Suchow, Jordan; Brady, Timothy Francis; Fougnie, Daryl; Alvarez, GeorgeThe MemToolbox is a collection of MATLAB functions for modeling visual working memory. In support of its goal to provide a full suite of data analysis tools, the toolbox includes implementations of popular models of visual working memory, real and simulated data sets, Bayesian and maximum likelihood estimation procedures for fitting models to data, visualizations of data and fit, validation routines, model comparison metrics, and experiment scripts. The MemToolbox is released under the permissive BSD license and is available at http://memtoolbox.org.Publication Measuring, monitoring, and maintaining memories in a partially observable mind(2014-06-06) Suchow, Jordan; Alvarez, George Angelo; Cavanagh, Patrick; Schacter, Daniel; Nowak, MartinVisual memory holds in mind details of objects, textures, faces, and scenes. After initial exposure to an image, however, visual memories rapidly degrade because they are transferred from iconic memory, a high-capacity sensory buffer, to working memory, a low-capacity maintenance system. How does visual memory maintenance work? This dissertation builds the argument that the maintenance of short-term visual memories is analogous to the act of breathing: it is a dynamic process with a default behavior that explains much of its usual workings, but which can be observed, overridden, and controlled. Chapter 1 shows how the act of trying to remember more information causes people to forget faster and to remember less ("load-dependent forgetting" and "overreaching"). It then shows how the paradigm of evolution can be applied to the problem of maintenance, with memories competing over a limited memory-supporting commodity, explaining these effects. Chapter 2 presents experiments on metamemory, the ability of people to observe and make decisions about their own memories. The experiments isolate a component of metamemory that monitors a memory's quality as it degrades over time. Chapter 3 connects memory to metamemory, drawing on work from reinforcement learning and decision theory to liken the problem of memory maintenance to that of an agent who sequentially decides what to prioritize in a partially observable mind.Publication Variability in the Quality of Visual Working Memory(Nature Publishing Group, 2012) Fougnie, Daryl; Suchow, Jordan; Alvarez, GeorgeWorking memory is a mental storage system that keeps task-relevant information accessible for a brief span of time, and it is strikingly limited. Its limits differ substantially across people but are assumed to be fixed for a given person. Here we show that there is substantial variability in the quality of working memory representations within an individual. This variability can be explained neither by fluctuations in attention or arousal over time, nor by uneven distribution of a limited mental commodity. Variability of this sort is inconsistent with the assumptions of the standard cognitive models of working memory capacity, including both slot- and resource-based models, and so we propose a new framework for understanding the limitations of working memory: a stochastic process of degradation that plays out independently across memories.Publication Looking Inward and Back: Real-Time Monitoring of Visual Working Memories.(American Psychological Association (APA), 2017-04) Suchow, Jordan; Fougnie, Daryl; Alvarez, GeorgeConfidence in our memories is influenced by many factors, including beliefs about the perceptibility or memorability of certain kinds of objects and events, as well as knowledge about our skill sets, habits, and experiences. Notoriously, our knowledge and beliefs about memory can lead us astray, causing us to be overly confident in eyewitness testimony or to overestimate the frequency of recent experiences. Here, using visual working memory as a case study, we stripped away all these potentially misleading cues, requiring observers to make confidence judgments by directly assessing the quality of their memory representations. We show that individuals can monitor the status of information in working memory as it degrades over time. Our findings suggest that people have access to information reflecting the existence and quality of their working memories, and furthermore, that they can use this information to guide their behavior.Publication Terms of the Debate on the Format and Structure of Visual Memory(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2014-06-04) Suchow, Jordan; Fougnie, Daryl; Brady, Timothy F.; Alvarez, GeorgeOur ability to actively maintain information in visual memory is strikingly limited. There is considerable debate about why this is so. As with many questions in psychology, the debate is framed dichotomously: Is visual working memory limited because it is supported by only a small handful of discrete “slots” into which visual representations are placed, or is it because there is an insufficient supply of a “resource” that is flexibly shared among visual representations? Here, we argue that this dichotomous framing obscures a set of at least eight underlying questions. Separately considering each question reveals a rich hypothesis space that will be useful for building a comprehensive model of visual working memory. The questions regard (1) an upper limit on the number of represented items, (2) the quantization of the memory commodity, (3) the relationship between how many items are stored and how well they are stored, (4) whether the number of stored items completely determines the fidelity of a representation (vs. fidelity being stochastic or variable), (5) the flexibility with which the memory commodity can be assigned or reassigned to items, (6) the format of the memory representation, (7) how working memories are formed, and (8) how memory representations are used to make responses in behavioral tasks. We reframe the debate in terms of these eight underlying questions, placing slot and resource models as poles in a more expansive theoretical space.Publication Silencing the Awareness of Change(Oxford University Press, 2017-06-22) Suchow, Jordan; Alvarez, GeorgeDetermining whether an object is changing is usually a simple matter of looking at it. But sometimes looking is not enough. For example, in the case of change blindness, drastic changes to a viewed scene become undetectable either because of a distracting flash that competes for attention or because the changes are slow and gradual. In silencing, a form of change blindness caused by the presence of motion, rapid and salient changes become hard to notice even without distraction This chapter describes the illusion of silencing. The strength of silencing depends on the speed of the motion, the structure of the objects, and whether the viewers move their eyes. The related concepts of awareness, consciousness, color perception, change blindness, attention, and motion processing are covered. The brief glimpse hypothesis and its limitations are also explored.