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Long-term memory never turns itself off: Evidence for long-term memory potentials related to change-detection performance

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 7, 3:00 – 5:00 pm, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Ella E. Weeks¹, Seth A. Marx¹, Geoffrey F. Woodman¹; ¹Vanderbilt University

Researchers believe that our ability to detect changes in the environment across brief interruptions in view relies almost completely on the visual working memory system. Here we test an alternative view that long-term memory representations support change-detection performance. We had a group of healthy young adults perform change detection while remembering sets of colors on each trial that frequently repeated, such that proactive interference was maximized, minimizing the utility of long-term memory. Despite this, we found that the first potentials to detect changes in the human brain are those related to long-term memory mechanisms (i.e., anterior P1/FN400). The change-detection activity measured over visual cortex was weaker and later than those measured at frontal electrodes where long-term memory potentials are maximal in amplitude. Our findings demonstrate that the human brain produces electrophysiological activity consistent with the proposal that long-term memory is encoding, storing, and retrieving information during color change-detection experiments thought to isolate and measure only storage in visual working memory.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Other