Large Capacity Temporary Visual Memory

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. General 2014-04, Vol.143 (2), p.548-565
• Main Authors: Endress, Ansgar D., Potter, Mary C.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adult; Biological and medical sciences; Cognition & reasoning; Experimental psychology; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Human; Human Channel Capacity; Humans; Interference (Learning); Learning. Memory; Long Term Memory; Male; Memory; Memory, Short-Term; Photic Stimulation; Proactive Inhibition; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Recognition, Psychology; Short Term Memory; Visual Memory; Visual task performance; Young Adult
• ISSN: 0096-3445; 1939-2222; 1939-2222
• DOI: 10.1037/a0033934

Visual working memory (WM) capacity is thought to be limited to 3 or 4 items. However, many cognitive activities seem to require larger temporary memory stores. Here, we provide evidence for a temporary memory store with much larger capacity than past WM capacity estimates. Further, based on previous WM research, we show that a single factor-proactive interference-is sufficient to bring capacity estimates down to the range of previous WM capacity estimates. Participants saw a rapid serial visual presentation of 5-21 pictures of familiar objects or words presented at rates of 4/s or 8/s, respectively, and thus too fast for strategies such as rehearsal. Recognition memory was tested with a single probe item. When new items were used on all trials, no fixed memory capacities were observed, with estimates of up to 9.1 retained pictures for 21-item lists, and up to 30.0 retained pictures for 100-item lists, and no clear upper bound to how many items could be retained. Further, memory items were not stored in a temporally stable form of memory but decayed almost completely after a few minutes. In contrast, when, as in most WM experiments, a small set of items was reused across all trials, thus creating proactive interference among items, capacity remained in the range reported in previous WM experiments. These results show that humans have a large-capacity temporary memory store in the absence of proactive interference, and raise the question of whether temporary memory in everyday cognitive processing is severely limited, as in WM experiments, or has the much larger capacity found in the present experiments.