Visual working memory capacity and proactive interference

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 ty...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2008-07, Vol.3 (7), p.e2716-e2716
Main Author: Hartshorne, Joshua K
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adults
Comparative analysis
Discrimination Learning
Experimental psychology
Humans
Immunological memory
Infants
Interference
Internet
Laboratories
Language
Linguistics
Memory
Memory tasks
Memory, Short-Term
Mental Recall
Mental task performance
Neuroscience/Cognitive Neuroscience
Neuroscience/Experimental Psychology
Neuroscience/Psychology
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Proactive Inhibition
Proactive interference
Quantitative psychology
Reproducibility of Results
Research methodology
Researchers
Retention, Psychology
Short term
Short term memory
Space Perception
Studies
Time Factors
Verbal Learning
Vision, Ocular
Visual Perception
Visual tasks
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary: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. 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%. 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.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0002716