Influence of concept or semantic relation of items in remembering perceptual details
Open Access
- Author:
- Subedi, Vijay
- Graduate Program:
- Psychology
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- February 26, 2024
- Committee Members:
- Bradley Wyble, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Nancy Dennis, Committee Member
Kristin Buss, Program Head/Chair
Frank Gerard Hillary, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Visual working memory
Chunking
Object Grouping
Visual details - Abstract:
- Visual working memory (VWM) – an important cognitive memory system for online storage and maintenance has always been contested for its representational capacity. Prior studies generally suggest discrete slots model (Luck and Vogel, 1997), resource pool model (Bays and Husain, 2008) as well as a hybrid type of model (Swan & Wyble, 2007). However, all three converge on the basis that working memory is of limited capacity and representation of items depends on such capacity. We investigate the usefulness of chunking – the association of items derived as a concept from long-term memory and how this helps structure memory. Chunking helps utilize available capacity to organize items into coherent unit such that limited available capacity can be efficiently utilized and this in turn helps improve recall. In a series of experiments, we showed that this organizational facility of chunking does exist, however the nature of chunking to preserve visual details bounded within the chunk (Allen et al, 2021) remained open to investigation as we failed to find an effect of chunking on memory for visual detail. In experiment 1 and 2, we utilized chunked letters to show that memory benefit existed in recalling letters, but this benefit was not translated in recalling the style of letters. In the next two experiments, we used object grouping as an extension of chunking to real-world objects, also provided a similar effect. We also showed objects were better recalled and their size easily discriminated when objects were semantically paired, however, the same memory effect in size was not found when objects were flipped.