Visual working memory for simple and complex visual stimuli
By H. Y. Eng, Diyu Chen, Yuhong Jiang. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2005
295 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Does the magical number four characterize our visual working memory (VWM) capacity for all kinds of objects, or is the capacity of VWM inversely related to the perceptual complexity of those objects? To find out how perceptual complexity affects VWM, we used a change detection task to measure VWM capacity for six types of stimuli of different complexity: colors, letters, polygons, squiggles, cubes, and faces. We found that the estimated capacity decreased for more complex stimuli, suggesting that perceptual complexity was an important factor in determining VWM capacity. However, the considerable correlation between perceptual complexity and VWM capacity declined significantly if subjects were allowed to view the sample memory display longer. We conclude that when encoding limitations are minimized, perceptual complexity affects, but does not determine, VWM capacity.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/06af8e87baf7e6fb8899c1f6221f29910fdf0911
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Citations in the corpus
- The mind and brain of short-term memory. (2008, background): “Below we outline these predictions and the behavioral, developmental, neuroimaging, and computational work that support this view.”
- Discrete Capacity Limits in Visual Working Memory (2010, background): “For example, it has been convincingly demonstrated that change detection performance is worse with complex stimuli [1,16].”