Effects of visual long-term memory on change detection

Abstract

Many previous studies have shown that visual memory plays an important role in change detection. Nishiyama & Kawaguchi (2014) focused on the visual long-term memory that was encoded before a change detection task, and they reported that the visual long-term memory affected the change detection performance. We investigated whether those results are reproducible. Participants performed two experiments consisting of a study phase, change detection phase, and indirect recognition phase (Nishiyama & Kawaguchi, 2014). They studied pre-change images of meaningless objects in both experiments. In Experiment 1, each image was studied five times, while in Experiment 2, each image was studied either five times or one time, and the change detection performance and results of the indirect recognition task were measured. The results of both experiments revealed that visual long-term memory could be retained in detail. However, these findings differed from those of Nishiyama & Kawaguchi (2014) and indicate the need for a more solid experimental procedure to clarify the effect of visual long-term memory on change detection.