The neural basis of working memory has been debated. What we like to call “The Standard Model” of working memory posits that persistent discharges generated by neurons in the prefrontal cortex constitute the neural correlate of working memory (2/10)

All in all, we characterize human memory for speed, showing that speed is better recalled for spatiotemporally bound than texture-like stimuli (the added dimension of space helps!). Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for Giuliana’s next adventures linking speed memory to motion extrapolation! 9/9

We looked hysteresis effects (yes they exist in these data!), the role of eye movements (no they can't explain these findings), and more. But importantly, people are MUCH BETTER at recalling the speed of a single dot moving around fixation, then the speed of more texture-like dot motion!! 8/n

Another cool finding: The memory target and the probe could either move in congruent (e.g., both clockwise) or incongruent (e.g., target moved clockwise, the probe counterclockwise) directions. Speed recall was better for congruent motion! 7/n

The stimulus was presented for 4–6 seconds, and remembered for 1–8 seconds. This mattered not for dot motion (blue), but it *did* matter for the single dot (red) such that errors were lower when people had more time to encode the speed, and higher at longer delays. 6/n

Replicating previous findings, we find that responses become less precise with faster speeds (i.e., response distributions become wider). Participants have a tendency to overestimate the speed of dot motion – recalling it faster than it actually was. 5/n

High time for a face off between types of motion. People were shown dot motion (blue) or a single dot (red) rotating around fixation at 6 different speeds. Speed was recalled by adjusting a probe to match the memory. We manipulated a bunch of other things, but more on that later. 4/n

But in the real world, moving objects tend to be spatiotemporally bound, like a cat diving into snow, or a ball flying across a field. We know less about such “higher level” motion, and even less about how speed processing & memory might differ between “lower” and “higher” level motion. 3/n

PhD student @g-gmg.bsky.social in our lab delved into this. Turns out, much of what we know about how humans process & remember speed is based on texture-like (or “lower level”) motion stimuli. Such stimuli are useful for studying early visual cortex – where receptive fields are small. 2/n