Semantic and Functional Relationships Among Objects Increase the Capacity of Visual Working Memory

Visual working memory (VWM) has a limited capacity of approximately 3–4 visual objects. Current theories of VWM propose that a limited pool of resources can be flexibly allocated to objects, allowing them to be represented at varying levels of precision. Factors that influence the allocation of these resources, such as the complexity and perceptual grouping of objects, can thus affect the capacity of VWM. We sought to identify whether semantic and functional relationships between objects could influence the grouping of objects, thereby increasing the functional capacity of VWM. Observers viewed arrays of 8 to-be-remembered objects arranged into 4 pairs. We manipulated both the semantic association and functional interaction between the objects, then probed participants’ memory for the arrays. When objects were semantically related, participants’ memory for the arrays improved. Participants’ memory further improved when semantically related objects were positioned to interact with each other. However, when we increased the spacing between the objects in each pair, the benefits of functional but not semantic relatedness were eliminated. These findings suggest that action-relevant properties of objects can increase the functional capacity of VWM, but only when objects are positioned to directly interact with each other.

[1]  G. A. Miller.  THE PSYCHOLOGICAL REVIEW THE MAGICAL NUMBER SEVEN, PLUS OR MINUS TWO: SOME LIMITS ON OUR CAPACITY FOR PROCESSING INFORMATION 1 , 1956 .

[2]  P. Cavanagh,et al.  The Capacity of Visual Short-Term Memory is Set Both by Visual Information Load and by Number of Objects , 2004, Psychological science.

[3]  Matthew S. Peterson,et al.  Visual working memory capacity for objects from different categories: A face-specific maintenance effect , 2008, Cognition.

[4]  W. Ma,et al.  A detection theory account of change detection. , 2004, Journal of vision.

[5]  Sebastian Schneegans,et al.  No fixed item limit in visuospatial working memory , 2016, Cortex.

[6]  Yaoda Xu.  Understanding the object benefit in visual short-term memory: The roles of feature proximity and connectedness , 2006, Perception & Psychophysics.

[7]  P. Quinlan,et al.  The precategorical nature of visual short-term memory. , 2016, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[8]  W. Ma,et al.  Changing concepts of working memory , 2014, Nature Neuroscience.

[9]  G W Humphreys,et al.  I can see what you are doing: Action familiarity and affordance promote recovery from extinction , 2006, Cognitive neuropsychology.

[10]  A. Torralba,et al.  The role of context in object recognition , 2007, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[11]  N. Cowan.  The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity , 2001, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[12]  Charles Hulme,et al.  Effects of word frequency and age of acquisition on short-term memory span , 1994, Memory & cognition.

[13]  A. Baddeley,et al.  Word length and the structure of short-term memory , 1975 .

[14]  Ingrid R Olson,et al.  Visual short-term memory is not improved by training , 2004, Memory & cognition.

[15]  S. Luck,et al.  Discrete fixed-resolution representations in visual working memory , 2008, Nature.

[16]  A. Hollingworth.  Scene and position specificity in visual memory for objects. , 2006, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[17]  Daniel A. Gajewski,et al.  Feature bindings endure without attention: Evidence from an explicit recall task , 2006, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[18]  J. G. Snodgrass,et al.  A standardized set of 260 pictures: norms for name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity. , 1980, Journal of experimental psychology. Human learning and memory.

[19]  Edward K. Vogel,et al.  The capacity of visual working memory for features and conjunctions , 1997, Nature.

[20]  D. M. Green,et al.  Signal detection theory and psychophysics , 1966 .

[21]  Timothy F. Brady,et al.  Compression in visual working memory: using statistical regularities to form more efficient memory representations. , 2009, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[22]  M. Manosevitz,et al.  High-Speed Scanning in Human Memory , 2022 .

[23]  Katherine L. Roberts,et al.  Action relations facilitate the identification of briefly-presented objects , 2011, Attention, perception & psychophysics.

[24]  I. Biederman,et al.  Scene perception: Detecting and judging objects undergoing relational violations , 1982, Cognitive Psychology.

[25]  John E Hummel,et al.  Familiar interacting object pairs are perceptually grouped. , 2006, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[26]  E. Vogel,et al.  PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Research Article Visual Working Memory Represents a Fixed Number of Items Regardless of Complexity , 2022 .

[27]  Gordon D. A. Brown,et al.  Memory for familiar and unfamiliar words: Evidence for a long-term memory contribution to short-term memory span , 1991 .

[28]  Wei Ji Ma,et al.  Variability in encoding precision accounts for visual short-term memory limitations , 2012, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[29]  Andrew Hollingworth.  Memory for real-world scenes , 2008 .

[30]  A. Treisman,et al.  Binding in short-term visual memory. , 2002, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[31]  Gary Lupyan,et al.  Objective Effects of Knowledge on Visual Perception , 2016, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[32]  James R. Brockmole,et al.  Semantic memory for contextual regularities within and across scene categories: Evidence from eye movements , 2010, Attention, perception & psychophysics.

[33]  Timothy F. Brady,et al.  A probabilistic model of visual working memory: Incorporating higher order regularities into working memory capacity estimates. , 2013, Psychological review.

[34]  tephen E. Palmer.  The effects of contextual scenes on the identification of objects , 1975, Memory & cognition.

[35]  A. Hollingworth.  Object-position binding in visual memory for natural scenes and object arrays. , 2007, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[36]  Jodi L. Davenport,et al.  Scene Consistency in Object and Background Perception , 2004, Psychological science.

[37]  Geoffrey F Woodman,et al.  Perceptual organization influences visual working memory , 2003, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[38]  P. Cavanagh,et al.  Flexible cognitive resources: competitive content maps for attention and memory , 2013, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[39]  Diane Pecher,et al.  No role for motor affordances in visual working memory. , 2013, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[40]  Chen Shuo.  The Capacity of Visual Working Memory for Motion Direction of Objects , 2006 .

[41]  Paul M Bays,et al.  Dynamic Updating of Working Memory Resources for Visual Objects , 2011, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[42]  Cheryl M. Capek,et al.  Preexisting semantic representation improves working memory performance in the visuospatial domain , 2016, Memory & cognition.

[43]  Yaoda Xu,et al.  Limitations of object-based feature encoding in visual short-term memory. , 2002, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.