School of Mechanical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, 211189, China.
Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2020 Nov;48(8):1376-1387. doi: 10.3758/s13421-020-01055-z.
High-complexity stimuli are thought to place extra demands on working memory when processing and manipulating such stimuli; however, operational definitions of complexity are not well established, nor are the measures that would demonstrate such effects. Here, we argue that complexity is a relative quantity that is affected by preexisting experience. Experiment 1 compared cued-recall performance for Chinese and English speakers when the stimuli involved Chinese features that varied in the number of strokes or involved Ethiopic features unfamiliar to both groups. Chinese pseudocharacters (two radicals) had half the strokes of Chinese pseudowords (two characters). The response terms were English words familiar to both groups. English speakers performed equivalently with the Ethiopic and pseudocharacters, but much worse on the pseudowords. In contrast, Chinese speakers performed equivalently with pseudowords or pseudocharacters, but worse with Ethiopic cues. Experiment 2 showed that the lack of a complexity effect for Chinese speakers was not due to greater ease of rehearsal of pseudowords compared with pseudocharacters. Experiment 3 ruled out that Chinese speakers are just better at learning paired associates involving Mandarin by demonstrating that while complexity did not affect them, other features of the stimuli did. Taken together, it appears that complexity is not an absolute property based on the number of visual elements, but rather a relative property affected by one's prior knowledge.
高复杂度刺激在处理和操作这些刺激时被认为会对工作记忆提出额外要求；然而，复杂性的操作定义尚未得到很好的确定，也没有能够证明这种影响的措施。在这里，我们认为复杂性是一种相对的量，受先前经验的影响。实验 1 比较了中国和英语使用者在刺激涉及汉字特征（笔画数量不同）或涉及两组人都不熟悉的埃塞俄比亚特征时的提示回忆表现。中文伪字符（两个部首）的笔画数是中文伪词（两个字符）的一半。反应项是两组人都熟悉的英语单词。英语使用者在埃塞俄比亚字符和伪字符上的表现相同，但在伪词上的表现要差得多。相比之下，中国使用者在伪词或伪字符上的表现相同，但在埃塞俄比亚提示上的表现更差。实验 2 表明，中国使用者没有表现出复杂性效应并不是因为他们更容易复习伪词，而是因为他们更容易复习伪字符。实验 3 排除了中国使用者只是更擅长学习涉及普通话的配对联想的可能性，因为实验表明，虽然复杂性对他们没有影响，但刺激的其他特征确实会影响他们。总之，复杂性似乎不是基于视觉元素数量的绝对属性，而是一种受个人先前知识影响的相对属性。
