Long-term memory is often considered easily corruptible, imprecise, and inaccurate, especially in comparison to working memory. However, most research used to support these findings relies on weak long-term memories: those where people have had only one brief exposure to an item. Here we investigated the fidelity of visual long-term memory in more naturalistic setting, with repeated exposures, and ask how it compares to visual working memory fidelity. Using psychophysical methods designed to precisely measure the fidelity of visual memory, we demonstrate that long-term memory for the color of frequently seen objects is as accurate as working memory for the color of a single item seen 1 s ago. In particular, we show that repetition greatly improves long-term memory, including the ability to discriminate an item from a very similar item (fidelity), in both a lab setting (Experiments 1-3) and a naturalistic setting (brand logos, Experiment 4). Overall, our results demonstrate the impressive nature of visual long-term memory fidelity, which we find is even higher fidelity than previously indicated in situations involving repetitions. Furthermore, our results suggest that there is no distinction between the fidelity of visual working memory and visual long-term memory, but instead both memory systems are capable of storing similar incredibly high-fidelity memories under the right circumstances. Our results also provide further evidence that there is no fundamental distinction between the "precision" of memory and the "likelihood of retrieving a memory," instead suggesting a single continuous measure of memory strength best accounts for working and long-term memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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工作记忆本质上比长期记忆更“精确”吗？经常遇到的物体的极高保真度视觉长期记忆。

长期记忆通常被认为容易损坏，不精确和不准确，特别是与工作记忆相比。但是，大多数用于支持这些发现的研究都依赖于长期记忆薄弱：那些人们只短暂接触过某项物品的那些记忆。在这里，我们研究了在更自然的环境中视觉长期记忆的逼真度，并反复曝光，并询问其与视觉工作记忆逼真度的比较。通过使用旨在精确测量视觉记忆保真度的心理物理方法，我们证明了对经常看到的物体的颜色的长期记忆与对1秒钟前看到的单个物品的颜色的工作记忆一样准确。特别是，我们证明重复可以极大地改善长期记忆，包括将一个项目与一个非常相似的项目（保真度）区分开的能力，在实验室环境（实验1-3）和自然环境（品牌徽标，实验4）中进行设置。总体而言，我们的结果证明了视觉长期记忆保真度的令人印象深刻的性质，我们发现其保真度比以前在涉及重复的情况下要高。此外，我们的结果表明，视觉工作记忆的保真度和视觉长期记忆之间没有区别，而是在适当的情况下，两种存储系统都能够存储相似的难以置信的高保真度记忆。我们的研究结果还提供了进一步的证据，表明记忆的“精确度”与“检索记忆的可能性”之间没有根本区别，相反，建议对记忆强度进行连续测量可以最好地说明工作记忆和长期记忆。