A Study Of Visual Coding And Verbal Coding During Visual Objects Working Memory

Some behavioral and neural studies have suggested that participants may have used both visual and verbal coding of visually presented objects in working memory at the same time.In the present study,we used change detection paradigm to examine the factors that may influence the level of verbal coding and visual coding of objects in visual working memory.The factors were task goal,time and spatial location in our studyIn Experiment 1,we tested the influence of task goal by using different probe types,only colors of probe stimuli,only words of probe stimuli,or both colors and words.The results suggested that verbal coding was automatically involved in processing objects in visual working memory and participants tended to encode visual items and adjust the level of verbal coding depending on the modality of the probe.In Experiment 2,we tested the influence of presentation time of study stimuli and duration of delay.The results showed that different presentation time of visual objects and duration of delay in visual working memory influenced the level of visual coding but not of verbal coding.In Experiment 3,we tested the influence of spatial location.The results showed that different spatial locations in visual working memory influenced the level of visual coding but not of verbal coding.