Updating objects in visual short-term memory is feature selective

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine whether the process of updating information in visual short-term memory (VSTM) is object based. We investigated whether modifying the memory of one feature of an object would automatically promote refreshing the memory of all of its other features. The results showed that the facilitative effect of updating was specific to the updated feature of an object and did not spread to its nonupdated features. This feature-selective effect suggests that updating VSTM is not object based (Experiment 1), even though storage was object based (Experiment 2). Control experiments ruled out strategy-based (Experiment 3) and stimulus-related (Experiments 4-6) accounts. Feature-selective updating may indicate that the mechanism used to modify the contents of memory may have a different basis than that used to encode or store information in memory.