[Tyler]

Human Memory Capacity is Larger than Expected
     


According to an MIT
news release, cognitive neuroscientists studying human memory
capacity and visual memory have discovered that the brain's ability to
store information is "much higher than previously believed or shown".
The researchers showed a series of 2,500 images to test subjects for 3
seconds each. Later, they were show pairs of very similar images and
asked which they had seen earlier. The researchers were surprised to see
recall rates as high as 92 percent. Timothy Brady, one of the
researchers, said, "To give just one example, this means that after
having seen thousands of objects, subjects didn't just remember which
cabinet they had seen, but also that the cabinet door was slightly
open". While we still don't know the total memory capacity of the
human brain, the researchers were able to prove that the minimum amount
of long term storage needed to for test subject's performance would be
228,000 bits. So, if we're burning up
28 kB of memory for simple tasks, the total amount available must be
significantly larger than any previous estimates. Big changes are needed
to existing cognitive models to account for this and there may be
implications in AI research as well. For more details including samples
of the image sets used, visit the MIT Massive Memory website and read the
full paper, Visual
long-term memory has a massive storage capacity for object details
(PDF format).
   

http://robots.net/article/2646.html