Visual short-term memory operates more efficiently on boundary features than on surface features

Abstract

A change detection task was used to estimate the visual short-term memory storage capacity for either the orientation or the size of objects. On each trial, several objects were briefly presented, followed by a blank inter- val and then by a second display of objects that either was identical to the first display or had a single object that was different (the object changed either orientation or size, in separate experiments). The task was to indicate whether the two displays were the same or different, and the number of objects remembered was estimated from the percent correct on this task. Storage capacity for a feature was nearly twice as large when that feature was de- fined by the object boundary, rather than by the surface texture of the object. This dramatic difference in storage capacity suggests that a particular feature (e.g., right tilted or small) is not stored in memory with an invariant abstract code. Instead, there appear to be different codes for the boundary and surface features of objects, and memory operates on boundary features more efficiently than it operates on surface features.