Dr. Janata's research into music and memory featured in Wall Street Journal Online
Weiwei Zhang and Steven J Luck (2008)
Discrete fixed-resolution representations in visual working memory.
Nature 453(7192):233-5.
Limits on the storage capacity of working memory significantly affect cognitive abilities in a wide range of domains, but the nature of these capacity limits has been elusive. Some researchers have proposed that working memory stores a limited set of discrete, fixed-resolution representations, whereas others have proposed that working memory consists of a pool of resources that can be allocated flexibly to provide either a small number of high-resolution representations or a large number of low-resolution representations. Here we resolve this controversyby providing independent measures of capacity and resolution. We show that, whenpresented with more than a few simple objects, human observers store a high-resolution representation of a subset of the objects and retain no information about the others. Memory resolution varied over a narrow range that cannot be explained in terms of a general resource pool but can be well explained by a small set of discrete, fixed-resolution representations.
Link to PubMed entry
Exploring the Mind Speaker Series - Dr. Paul Ekman, UC San Francisco