Visual working memory capacity and proactive interference.
BACKGROUND
Visual working memory capacity is extremely limited and appears to be relatively immune to practice effects or the use of explicit strategies. The recent discovery that visual working memory tasks, like verbal working memory tasks, are subject to proactive interference, coupled with the fact that typical visual working memory tasks are particularly conducive to proactive interference, suggests that visual working memory capacity may be systematically under-estimated.


RESULTS
Working memory capacity was probed behaviorally in adult humans both in laboratory settings and via the Internet. Several experiments show that although the effect of proactive interference on visual working memory is significant and can last over several trials, it only changes the capacity estimate by about 15%.


CONCLUSIONS
This study further confirms the sharp limitations on visual working memory capacity, both in absolute terms and relative to verbal working memory. It is suggested that future research take these limitations into account in understanding differences across a variety of tasks between human adults, prelinguistic infants and nonlinguistic animals.
Hartshorne
Joshua K
JK
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America. jharts@wjh.harvard.edu
D004193:Discrimination Learning; D006801:Humans; D008568:Memory; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D011939:Mental Recall; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011334:Proactive Inhibition; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012153:Retention, Psychology; D013028:Space Perception; D013997:Time Factors; D014706:Verbal Learning; D014785:Vision, Ocular; D014796:Visual Perception