Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States of America.
Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2020 Nov 11;15(11):e0241110. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0241110. eCollection 2020.
We can retain only a portion of the visual information that we encounter within our visual working memory. Which factors influence how much information we can remember? Recent studies have demonstrated that the capacity of visual working memory is influenced by the type of information to be remembered and is greater for real-world objects than for abstract stimuli. One explanation for this effect is that the semantic knowledge associated with real-world objects makes them easier to maintain in working memory. Previous studies have indirectly tested this proposal and led to inconsistent conclusions. Here, we directly tested whether semantic knowledge confers a benefit for visual working memory by using familiar and unfamiliar real-world objects. We found a mnemonic benefit for familiar objects in adults and children between the ages of 4 and 9 years. Control conditions ruled out alternative explanations, namely the possibility that the familiar objects could be more easily labeled or that there were differences in low-level visual features between the two types of objects. Together, these findings demonstrate that semantic knowledge influences visual working memory, which suggests that the capacity of visual working memory is not fixed but instead fluctuates depending on what has to be remembered.
我们在视觉工作记忆中只能保留我们所遇到的视觉信息的一部分。哪些因素会影响我们能记住多少信息？最近的研究表明，视觉工作记忆的容量受到要记住的信息类型的影响，对于真实世界的物体来说，比抽象刺激的容量更大。对于这种现象的一种解释是，与真实世界的物体相关的语义知识使得它们更容易在工作记忆中保持。之前的研究已经间接地检验了这一假设，并得出了不一致的结论。在这里，我们通过使用熟悉和不熟悉的真实世界的物体直接测试了语义知识是否为视觉工作记忆提供了好处。我们发现，成人和 4 至 9 岁的儿童对熟悉的物体有记忆优势。控制条件排除了其他解释，即熟悉的物体可能更容易被标记，或者两种类型的物体之间存在低水平视觉特征的差异。这些发现共同表明，语义知识会影响视觉工作记忆，这表明视觉工作记忆的容量不是固定的，而是根据需要记住的内容而波动的。
