The Influence Of Object Similarity On Visual Working Memory Representation Precision

The visual working memory system can help people to store the sensory information from the outside world for a short time.This system has an important role in a variety of fine advancedcognitive tasks.The individual can use the similarity as an important way to storerepresentations in the visual working memory.However,the current study of the effect of object similarity on visual working memory and the interpretation of similarity effects in visual working memory have different conclusions from different experimental materials and methods.Some studies suggest that the object similarity may suppress the visual working memory,the reason is that similar items compete resources,or interference and overlap between each other(Alvarez & Cavanagh,2004;Saito & Miyake,2004).Some studies suggest that object similarity plays a positive role in promoting visual working memory,the reason is that the similar objects can simplifythe global representations to decrease the memory load or improve the precision of the memory item in the maintenance phase(Mate &Baque,2009;Lin & Luck,2009).Therefore this question does not yet formed a unified conclusion.Based on some existing shortcomingsofthe previous researches,this study has three experiments to further explore the similarity effect.All the three experiments use the recall report paradigm to discuss the mechanism of the similarity positive effect.Experiment 1,by manipulating the number of similar items,finds that the similarity of object orientation has a positive effect on the representation precision of visual working memory,and the promotion effect is more obvious as the pairof similar items increased.Experiment 2 modulatesthe spatial location of similar items in order to examine whether the dependence of the similarity positive effects in experiment 1 is related to the spatial position.It finds that the similarity positive effect disappears when two pairs of similar items are in the diagonal position.In Experiment 3,a pair of similar items and two pairs of similar items are used.All the similar items are separated.The results show that the memory precision of two pairs of similar items is equal to that of a pair of similar items in two-four quadrants,which indicates that the disappearance of the similarity positive effect in experiment 2 is the interference between two pairs of similar items rather than the effect of spatial separation.In addition,when the similar items are in the two-fourquadrant,participatescan get priority processing.This study confirms the positive effects of object similarity by three experiments,and provides new evidence from the perspective of memory precision.Similarity can not only improve theaccuracyand capacity of visual working memory,but also improve the memoryprecision.The application of recall reportparadigm can discriminate two kinds of interferencesabout the positive effect of similarity,and the results also show that the improvement of memory representation is one of the reasons for the positive effect of similarity in the visual working memory maintenance phase.