William Atkins
Sunday, 14 September 2008 00:23
Science -
Biology
Page 2 of 3
Thus, within the abstract to their paper, the researchers state,
“Contrary to this assumption, here we show that long-term memory is capable of storing a massive number of objects with details from the image.”
The researchers studied subjects who were asked to observe images of 2,500 real-world objects for three seconds each, over a 5.5-hour period.
Some of the "real-world" objects are shown on the
second page (pdf file) of their paper.
After this initial period, the researchers asked the participants to look at additional objects, but this time as pairs of images. The objects previously viewed might be paired with either
“an object from a novel category, an object of the same basic-level category, or the same object in a different state or pose.”
In all of these three cases, the researchers found that the performance of the subjects were
“remarkably high” with respect to their ability to maintain detailed representation of the images.
The ability of the subjects to remember the objects were 92%, 88%, and 87%, respectively (as stated two paragraphs earlier).
One of the researchers, MIT cognitive neuroscientist
Timothy Brady, stated
"People had never tested whether people could remember this much detail about this many objects. Nobody actually pushed it this far." [Fox News: “
Humans have astonishing memories, study finds”]
Please see the conclusions of their paper on page three.
