Editing Visual short-term memory (section)

==Overview==

The introduction of [[stimulation|stimuli]] which were hard to verbalize, and unlikely to be held in [[long-term memory]], revolutionized the study of VSTM in the early 1970s.<ref name="Cermak 1971">{{cite journal |doi=10.3758/BF03329095|title=Short-term recognition memory for complex free-form figures |journal=Psychonomic Science |volume=25|issue=4|pages=209–211|year=1971|last1=Cermak|first1=Gregory W.|doi-access=free}}</ref><ref name="Phillips 1974">{{cite journal | last1 = Phillips | first1 = W.A. | year = 1974 | title = On the distinction between sensory storage and short-term visual memory | journal = Perception & Psychophysics | volume = 16 | issue = 2| pages = 283–290 | doi = 10.3758/bf03203943 | doi-access = free }}</ref><ref name="Phillips 1971">{{cite journal | last1 = Phillips | first1 = W.A. | last2 = Baddeley | first2 = A.D. | year = 1971 | title = Reaction time and short-term visual memory | journal = Psychonomic Science | volume = 22 | issue = 2| pages = 73–74 | doi = 10.3758/bf03332500 | doi-access = free }}</ref> The basic experimental technique used required observers to indicate whether two matrices,<ref name="Phillips 1974"/><ref name="Phillips 1971"/> or figures,<ref name="Cermak 1971"/> separated by a short temporal interval, were the same. The finding that observers were able to report that a change had occurred, at levels significantly above chance, indicated that they were able to encode aspect of the first stimulus in a purely visual store, at least for the period until the presentation of the second stimulus. However, as the stimuli used were complex, and the nature of the change relatively uncontrolled, these experiments left open various questions, such as:
#whether only a subset of the perceptual dimensions comprising a visual stimulus are stored (e.g., spatial frequency, luminance, or contrast)
#whether perceptual dimensions are maintained in VSTM with greater fidelity than others
#the nature by which these dimensions are encoded (i.e., are perceptual dimensions encoded within separate, parallel channels, or are all perceptual dimensions stored as a single bound entity within VSTM?).