Eng Hing Yee, Chen Diyu, Jiang Yuhong
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2005 Dec;12(6):1127-33. doi: 10.3758/bf03206454.
Does the magical number four characterize our visual working memory (VWM) capacity for all kinds of objects, or is the capacity of VWM inversely related to the perceptual complexity of those objects? To find out how perceptual complexity affects VWM, we used a change detection task to measure VWM capacity for six types of stimuli of different complexity: colors, letters, polygons, squiggles, cubes, and faces. We found that the estimated capacity decreased for more complex stimuli, suggesting that perceptual complexity was an important factor in determining VWM capacity. However, the considerable correlation between perceptual complexity and VWM capacity declined significantly if subjects were allowed to view the sample memory display longer. We conclude that when encoding limitations are minimized, perceptual complexity affects, but does not determine, VWM capacity.
神奇的数字4是否代表了我们对所有类型物体的视觉工作记忆（VWM）容量，还是VWM容量与这些物体的感知复杂性呈负相关？为了弄清楚感知复杂性如何影响VWM，我们使用了一个变化检测任务来测量对六种不同复杂性刺激的VWM容量：颜色、字母、多边形、曲线、立方体和面孔。我们发现，对于更复杂的刺激，估计容量会降低，这表明感知复杂性是决定VWM容量的一个重要因素。然而，如果允许受试者更长时间地查看样本记忆显示，感知复杂性与VWM容量之间的显著相关性会显著下降。我们得出结论，当编码限制最小化时，感知复杂性会影响但不能决定VWM容量。
