Effects of strategy on visual working memory capacity

被引:30
作者
Bengson, Jesse J. [1 ,2 ]
Luck, Steven J. [1 ,2 ]
机构
[1] Univ Calif Davis, Ctr Mind & Brain, Davis, CA 95618 USA
[2] Univ Calif Davis, Dept Psychol, Davis, CA 95618 USA
关键词
Working memory; Visual working memory; INDIVIDUAL-DIFFERENCES; REPRESENTATIONS; ATTENTION; INTELLIGENCE; ACCESS;
D O I
10.3758/s13423-015-0891-7
中图分类号
B841 [心理学研究方法];
学科分类号
040201 ;
摘要
Substantial evidence suggests that individual differences in estimates of working memory capacity reflect differences in how effectively people use their intrinsic storage capacity. This suggests that estimated capacity could be increased by instructions that encourage more effective encoding strategies. The present study tested this by giving different participants explicit strategy instructions in a change detection task. Compared to a condition in which participants were simply told to do their best, we found that estimated capacity was increased for participants who were instructed to remember the entire visual display, even at set sizes beyond their capacity. However, no increase in estimated capacity was found for a group that was told to focus on a subset of the items in supracapacity arrays. This finding confirms the hypothesis that encoding strategies may influence visual working memory performance, and it is contrary to the hypothesis that the optimal strategy is to filter out any items beyond the storage capacity.
引用
收藏
页码:265 / 270
页数:6
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