Daryl Fougnie

• Professor (Assistant) at New York University Abu Dhabi

Theories of visual working memory have seen significant progress through the use of continuous reproduction tasks. However, these tasks have mainly focused on studying visual features, with limited examples existing in the auditory domain. Therefore, it is unknown to what extent newly developed memory models reflect domain-general limitations or ar...

When asked to remember a color, do people remember a point estimate (e.g., a particular shade of red), a point estimate plus an uncertainty estimate, or are memory representations rich probabilistic distributions over feature space? We asked participants to report the color of a circle held in working memory. Rather than collecting a single report...

Attribute amnesia describes the failure to unexpectedly report the attribute of an attended stimulus, likely reflecting a lack of working memory consolidation. Previous studies have shown that unique meaningful objects are immune to attribute amnesia. However, these studies used highly dissimilar foils to test memory, raising the possibility that g...

Attribute amnesia describes the failure to unexpectedly report the attribute of an attended stimulus, likely reflecting a lack of working memory consolidation. Previous studies have shown that unique meaningful objects are immune to attribute amnesia. However, these studies used highly dissimilar foils to test memory, raising the possibility that g...

Information that was once relevant may cease to be important. How do we forget irrelevant information and how is this affected by remembering new information? We explored this by embedding a directed forgetting task in a visual long-term memory paradigm. Participants were shown a series of images. Each image was followed by the cue to Remember or F...

Selective mechanisms allow us to prioritize items held in working memory. Does this reflect reallocation of working memory resources? We examined a critical prediction of this account—that reallocating more resources from one item to another should provide a greater benefit. We used a reward manipulation to create variable allocation of resources....

When we see a stimulus, e.g. a star-shaped object, our intuition is that we should perceive a single, coherent percept (even if it is inaccurate). But the neural processes that support perception are complex and probabilistic. Simple lines cause orientation-selective neurons across a population to fire in a probabilistic-like manner. Does probabili...

When we see a stimulus, e.g. a star-shaped object, our intuition is that we should perceive a single, coherent percept (even if it is inaccurate). But the neural processes that support perception are complex and probabilistic. Simple lines cause orientation-selective neurons across a population to fire in a probabilistic-like manner. Does probabili...

Attention is captured by information matching the contents of working memory. Though many factors modulate the amount of capture, there is surprising resistance to cognitive control. Capture occurs even when participants are instructed either that an item would never be a target or to drop that item from memory. Does the persistence of capture unde...

Expectations about the environment play a large role in shaping behavior, but how does this occur? Do expectations change the way we perceive the world, or just our decisions based on unbiased perceptions? We investigated the relative contributions of priors to these 2 stages by manipulating when information about expected color was provided. We co...

Attentional mechanisms allow us to focus on objects that would help us achieve our goals while ignoring those that would distract us. Attention can also be focused internally toward specific items in memory. But does selection within memory work similarly to selection within perception? Perceptual attention is fast and effective at selecting region...

Attentional mechanisms in perception can operate over locations, features, or objects. However, people direct attention not only towards information in the external world, but also to information maintained in working memory. To what extent do perception and memory draw on similar selection properties? Here we examined whether principles of object-...

In a retro-cue paradigm, after memorizing a set of objects, people are cued to remember only a subset. Improved memory from the retro-cue suggests that selection processes can benefit items stored in working memory. Does selection in working memory require attention? If so, an attention-demanding task should disrupt retro-cue effects. Studies using...

Does the strength of representations in long-term memory (LTM) depend on which type of attention is engaged? We tested participants’ memory for objects seen during visual search. We compared implicit memory for two types of objects—related-context nontargets that grabbed attention because they matched the target defining feature (i.e., color; top-d...

Items held in working memory (WM) capture attention (memory-driven capture). People can selectively prioritize specific object features in WM. Here, we examined whether feature-specific prioritization within WM modulates memory-driven capture. In Experiment 1, after remembering the color and orientation of a triangle, participants were instructed,...

Tasks that require tracking visual information reveal the severe limitations of our capacity to attend to multiple objects that vary in time and space. Although these limitations have been extensively characterized in the visual domain, very little is known about tracking information in other sensory domains. Does tracking auditory information exhi...

Much is known about the speed and accuracy of search in single-target search tasks, but less attention has been devoted to understanding search in multiple-target foraging tasks. These tasks raise and answer important questions about how individuals decide to terminate searches in cases in which the number of targets in each display is unknown. Eve...

Confidence 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 testi...

Studies have shown that working memory capability is limited, even for simple visual features. However, typical studies may underestimate the amount and richness of information in memory by relying on paradigms where participants only make a single recall response. To examine this possibility, we had participants memorize five briefly presented col...

Is working memory capacity determined by an immutable limit-for example, 4 memory storage slots? The fact that performance is typically unaffected by task instructions has been taken as support for such structural models of memory. Here, we modified a standard working memory task to incentivize participants to remember more items. Participants were...

Humans engage in many tasks that involve gathering multiple targets from their environment (e.g. picking berries from a patch). Such foraging tasks raise questions about how observers maximize target collection-e.g. how long should one spend at one berry patch before moving to the next patch. Classic optimal foraging theories propose a simple decis...

A longstanding debate in working memory (WM) is whether information is maintained in a central, capacity-limited storage system or whether there are domain-specific stores for different modalities. This question is typically addressed by determining whether concurrent storage of 2 different memory arrays produces interference. Prior studies using t...

The severely limited capacity of visual working memory is thought to result from a fixed storage capacity, rather than limitations at encoding or retrieval. Thus, most investigations of working memory have focused on understanding the storage systemits capacity, its flexibility, and the units over which it operates. Little work has investigated how...

Much is known about visual search for single targets, but relatively little about how participants "forage" for multiple targets. One important question is how long participants will search before moving to a new display. Evidence suggests that participants should leave when intake drops below the average rate ("optimal foraging," Charnov, 1976). H...

Our 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 p...

Attention and awareness are two tightly coupled processes that have been the subject of the same enduring debate: Are they allocated in a discrete or in a graded fashion? Using the attentional blink paradigm and mixture-modeling analysis, we show that awareness arises at central stages of information processing in an all-or-none manner. Manipulatin...

The 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,...

People can only store a limited amount of information in visual working memory. What is the nature of this limit, and does its expression depend on task demands or is it fixed? Here we show evidence that participants have control over both the quantity and fidelity of items stored in working memory. Participants were briefly shown five colored circ...

Slot and resource models have been influential in the study of visual working memory capacity. However, several recent empirical findings are not explicitly predicted by either model. These findings include: (1) a shared limit on the fidelity of working memory and long-term memory, (2) stochastic variability in working memory that is not explained...

Working 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...

Influential theories of visual working memory have proposed that the basic units of memory are integrated object representations. Key support for this proposal is provided by the same object benefit: It is easier to remember multiple features of a single object than the same set of features distributed across multiple objects. Here, we replicate th...

Metamemory is the cognitive capacity to make decisions about the existence and fidelity of one's own memories. Here, we describe two experiments that demonstrate high-quality visual working metamemory. Participants were asked to remember the colors of a set of colorful dots. In the first experiment, on half of the trials participants reported the c...

The Attentional Blink (AB) refers to the profound impairment in consciously detecting the second of two targets presented serially among distractors, when that second target (T2) occurs within 500ms of the first (T1). The AB paradigm has recently been used to investigate whether conscious perception is a graded or quantal (all-or-none) state, with...

Working memory, the ability to retain task-relevant information in an accessible state over a brief span of time, is strikingly limited. Models of working memory explain these limitations by postulating a finite resource that is divided among stored items in a continuous or quantized manner, and they assume that the quality of memory representation...

The visual system’s tendency to represent summary statistical information from crowds of objects has been well documented in recent research. However, this property of the visual system has the potential to provide insight into other visual phenomena as well. In the current set of experiments, we tested whether orientation information is automatica...

The world is composed of features and objects and this structure may influence what is stored in working memory. It is widely believed that the content of memory is object-based: Memory stores integrated objects, not independent features. We asked participants to report the color and orientation of an object and found that memory errors were largel...

How does the structure of the environment shape what we store in working memory? Information in the world is bound into meaningful units -objects- and it is widely believed that the contents of visual working memory are bound object representations. This account suggests that, for sample displays containing more information than can be stored, we h...

There is considerable debate on whether working memory (WM) storage is mediated by distinct subsystems for auditory and visual stimuli (Baddeley, 1986) or whether it is constrained by a single, central capacity-limited system (Cowan, 2006). Recent studies have addressed this issue by measuring the dual-task cost during the concurrent storage of aud...

An influential theory suggests that integrated objects, rather than individual features, are the fundamental units that limit our capacity to temporarily store visual information (S. J. Luck & E. K. Vogel, 1997). Using a paradigm that independently estimates the number and precision of items stored in working memory (W. Zhang & S. J. Luck, 2008), h...

An influential theory (Luck & Vogel, 1997) suggests that objects, rather than individual object features, are the fundamental units that limit our capacity to temporarily store visual information. This conclusion was drawn from paradigms in which the observer must detect whether a change occurred between a sample and a probe array when the arrays a...

One important aspect of visual perception is the ability to bind together different visual features into a coherent object percept. We are also able to maintain a limited number of such bound objects in visual working memory (VWM). While it is widely believed that attention plays a necessary role in perceptual feature binding, it is unclear whether...

Previous evidence suggests that exogenous spatial attention spreads in perceived three-dimensional (3D) space as determined by binocular disparity and occlusion. In this study we asked whether spatial attention spreads across the surface of a 3D object that is oriented in depth in terms of actual or perceived space. To examine this question, we emp...

While working memory (WM) is regarded as a capacity-limited process, theories differ on whether that capacity is set by modality-specific stores (Baddeley, 1986) or a single, unimodal store (Cowan, 1995). In support of the unimodal theory, several studies have observed dual-task interference between visual and verbal WM tasks (Morey & Cowan, 2004;...

Previous evidence suggests that attention can operate on object-based representations. It is not known whether these representations encode depth information and whether object depth, if encoded, is in viewer- or object-centered coordinates. To examine these questions, we employed a spatial cuing paradigm in which one corner of a 3-D object was exo...

Our capacity to select visual targets out of a scene of distractors is severely limited. Likewise, our capacity to hold visual stimuli in mind once the scene is out of sight is impoverished. These reflect the capacity limits of attention and visual short-term memory (VSTM), respectively. Attentional capacity limits have been studied with the multip...

The concurrent maintenance of two visual working memory (VWM) arrays can lead to profound interference. It is unclear, however, whether these costs arise from limitations in VWM storage capacity (Fougnie & Marois, 2006) or from interference between the storage of one visual array and encoding or retrieval of another visual array (Cowan & Morey, 200...

One of the most influential theories in visual cognition proposes that attention is necessary to bind different visual features into coherent object percepts (Treisman & Gelade, 1980). While considerable evidence supports a role for attention in perceptual feature binding, whether attention plays a similar function in visual working memory (VWM) re...

When attention is engaged in a task, unexpected events in the visual scene may go undetected, a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness (IB). At what stage of information processing must attention be engaged for IB to occur? Although manipulations that tax visuospatial attention can induce IB, the evidence is more equivocal for tasks that engag...

A hallmark of both visual attention and working memory is their severe capacity limit: People can attentively track only about four objects in a multiple object tracking (MOT) task and can hold only up to four objects in visual working memory (VWM). It has been proposed that attention underlies the capacity limit of VWM. We tested this hypothesis b...

The right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) is critical for stimulus-driven attention and visual awareness. Here we show that as the visual short-term memory (VSTM) load of a task increases, activity in this region is increasingly suppressed. Correspondingly, increasing VSTM load impairs the ability of subjects to consciously detect the presence of a...