Categorical bias in VWM in healthy aging: Does VWM become more categorical as we get older?

Markaki, Maria (2021) Categorical bias in VWM in healthy aging: Does VWM become more categorical as we get older? Research Project 1 (minor thesis), Behavioural and Cognitive Neurosciences.

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Abstract

Visual working memory (VWM) is defined as the limited amount of visual information that can be maintained when visual stimuli are not visible. This information can either be stored as a categorical (e.g., red) or as a continuous representation (e.g., a hue of red). Studies have shown that people tend to respond based on the general category that an item belongs to, especially when they need to store many items in their VWM. This we define as categorical bias. Many studies have shown that during healthy aging, VWM capacity is reduced and the precision of representations in VWM declines. The aim of this study is to compare VWM representations in healthy, older adults with those in middle-aged and younger adults, to determine whether older adults show a stronger categorical bias than young adults do, and to what extent the categorical bias of older adults depends on the number of items that they need to remember. In order to complete this project, we collected data in an online task from 90 people in evenly distributed age groups, 18-29, 30-59, 60-70. On each trial, a memory display with colored circles was placed evenly in a circular arrangement around a fixation dot. The size of the set was between 1 and 4 memory items. We used a color delayed estimation task, and we analyzed the responses with a mixture model with three parameters, each of the parameters was fitted to the Response Bias (the error in the direction of category prototypes) which allowed us the access to categori

Item Type:	Thesis (Research Project 1 (minor thesis))
Supervisor name:	Mathot, S. and Zhou, X. and Berg, B. van den
Degree programme:	Behavioural and Cognitive Neurosciences
Thesis type:	Research Project 1 (minor thesis)
Language:	English
Date Deposited:	21 Jul 2021 10:09
Last Modified:	21 Jul 2021 10:09
URI:	https://fse.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/25259

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