Memory of gender and gait direction from biological motion: gender fades away but directions stay.

The delayed discrimination methodology has been used to demonstrate a high-fidelity nondecaying visual short-term memory (VSTM) for so-called preattentive basic features. In the current Study, I show that the nondecaying high VSTM precision is not restricted to basic features by using the same method to measure memory precision for gait direction and gender-stereotypical gait patterns from high-level point-light walkers. Nondecaying VSTM of direction was found for delays up to 9 s whereas memory for gender decayed. For both tasks, reaction times (RTs) increased with the delay, but only gender RT took longer when the two walkers faced different directions to the line of sight as compared to when they faced the same direction. The results may reflect differences between local and global processes, or an ecologically valid strategy where VSTM resources focus on variables that change, such as tracking people's movements, rather than variables that are constant during short timescales, such as gender.