A Visual Short-Term Memory Advantage for Objects of Expertise

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) is limited, especially for complex objects. Its capacity, however, is greater for faces than for other objects this advantage may stem from the holistic nature of face processing. If the holistic processing explains this advantage, object expertise-which also relies on holistic processing-should endow experts with a VSTM advantage. The authors compared VSTM for cars among car experts and car novices. Car experts, but not car novices, demonstrated a VSTM advantage similar to that for faces; this advantage was orientation specific and was correlated with an individual's level of car expertise. Control experiments ruled out accounts based solely on verbal- or long-term memory representations. These findings suggest that the processing advantages afforded by visual expertise result in domain-specific increases in VSTM capacity, perhaps by allowing experts to maximize the use of an inherently limited VSTM system.