The Effect of Presentation on Visual Working Memory

Abstract

AbstractThis paper reports experiments investigating the effect of presentation on visual working memory (VWM) when set-size increases. The capacity of VWM is limited to approximately four items (Luck & Vogel, 1997) and increasing set-size impairs the performance in visual tasks. Also, the performance in visuospatial tasks was better in the simultaneous presentation than in the sequential presentation. However, it is possible that large set-size in the simultaneous presentation caused overload in visual processing, and also, there is a possibility to increase interference among stimuli.Therefore, we speculated that performance in a simultaneous presentation would show a sharper decrease than in a partitioned presentation, which divides stimuli into two halves in order to reduce visual processing load and interference among stimuli when number of stimuli increases. Thus, the experiments with two types of set-size and two types of presentations (simultaneous and partitioned) were performed.The experiment examined whether a probe item was old or novel after seeing 4 or 8 items that appeared at random locations. These items were displayed either in simultaneous or in a partitioned manner. The results revealed a significant interaction between set-size and presentation. In a small set-size condition, performance was better in the simultaneous presentation than in the partitioned presentation. However, no difference was found between performances for both presentations in the large set-size condition, as it was influenced by the partitioned presentation. The results proposed that the partitioned presentation was more stable method to show items than the simultaneous presentation when set-size is large.