Journal
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY-LEARNING MEMORY AND COGNITION
Volume 46, Issue 10, Pages 1998-2005Publisher
AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC
DOI: 10.1037/xlm0000847
Keywords
visual working memory; long-term memory; encoding time benefits; real-world objects
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Funding
- Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province [LY18C090007]
- China Scholarship Council (CSC) scholarship [201508330313]
- Guangdong Regional Joint Foundation [2019A1515110581]
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It is generally assumed that the storage capacity of visual working memory (VWM) is limited, holding about 3-4 items. Recent work with real-world objects, however, has challenged this view by providing evidence that the VWM capacity for real-world objects is not fixed but instead increases with prolonged encoding time (Brady, Stormer, & Alvarez, 2016). Critically, in this study, no increase with prolonged encoding time was observed for storing simple colors. Brady et al. (2016) argued that the larger capacity for real-world objects relative to colors is due to the additional conceptual information of real-world objects. With basically the same methods of Brady et al., in Experiments 1-3, we were unable to replicate their basic findings. Instead, we found that visual memory for simple colors also benefited from prolonged encoding time. Experiment 4 showed that the scale of the encoding time benefit was the same for familiar and unfamiliar objects, suggesting that the added conceptual information does not contribute to this benefit. We conclude that visual memory benefits from prolonged encoding time regardless of stimulus type.
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