High-Fidelity Perceptual Long-Term Memory

Abstract

Visual long-term memory for spatial information was assessed by measuring discrimination thresholds for the spatial frequency of sinusoidal gratings in a delayed discrimination task, with various time intervals separating test and reference stimuli The results demonstrate perfect preservation of information across 1-s to 50-hr retention intervals in the sense that the spatial frequency discrimination thresholds remained at the level defined by the spatial resolution of the sensory analysis This high-fidelity spatial long-term memory may represent an elementary memory mechanism for precategoncal storage of visual features