Capacity Limitations in Memory for Visual Locations

This paper examines people's ability to make judgments which require them to know the relative positions of objects that are not simultaneously visible is examined. It has previously been shown that people can accurately perform such a task. The current experiments test the capacity limits for such tasks. Two experiments were conducted that required subjects to make spatial judgments based on sequences of points presented two at a time. It was shown that, whereas subjects can perform accurately when memory for a small number of dots (about four) is required, increasing the number of dots results in a radical reduction in performance. This argues against both the idea that spatial memory is based on a linguistic description and the idea that it is based on an image-like representation. Rather it appears that one can form an accurate representation of the spatial properties of a small number of objects.

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