Visual Working Memory Capacity and Proactive Interference

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 3; no. 7; p. e2716
• Main Author: Hartshorne, Joshua K.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 23.07.2008; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Adults; Comparative analysis; Discrimination Learning; Experimental psychology; Humans; Immunological memory; Infants; Interference; Internet; Laboratories; Language; Linguistics; Memory; Memory tasks; Memory, Short-Term; Mental Recall; Mental task performance; Neuroscience/Cognitive Neuroscience; Neuroscience/Experimental Psychology; Neuroscience/Psychology; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Proactive Inhibition; Proactive interference; Quantitative psychology; Reproducibility of Results; Research methodology; Researchers; Retention, Psychology; Short term; Short term memory; Space Perception; Studies; Time Factors; Verbal Learning; Vision, Ocular; Visual Perception; Visual tasks
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0002716

Visual working memory capacity is extremely limited and appears to be relatively immune to practice effects or the use of explicit strategies. The recent discovery that visual working memory tasks, like verbal working memory tasks, are subject to proactive interference, coupled with the fact that typical visual working memory tasks are particularly conducive to proactive interference, suggests that visual working memory capacity may be systematically under-estimated. Working memory capacity was probed behaviorally in adult humans both in laboratory settings and via the Internet. Several experiments show that although the effect of proactive interference on visual working memory is significant and can last over several trials, it only changes the capacity estimate by about 15%. This study further confirms the sharp limitations on visual working memory capacity, both in absolute terms and relative to verbal working memory. It is suggested that future research take these limitations into account in understanding differences across a variety of tasks between human adults, prelinguistic infants and nonlinguistic animals.