The Impact of Object Complexity on Visual Working Memory Capacity

The capacity of visual working memory (VWM) is regarded as one of the central themes in working memory. Related studies-on cognitive psychology and neuroscience level focused on the flexibility of capacity of working memory and the influencing factors. The current study aimed at the relationship of object complexity and VWM capacity, which used change detection paradigm in order to reveal the mechanism of object representation in visual working memory. We explored the impact of complexity on capacity of VWM by different-complexity-level Snodgrass line drawings. Participants were required to remember 2, 3 or 5 objects at the same time. In experiment 1, we set the initial stimulus exposure time at 500 ms to investigate the complexity effect. Then we varied the duration of the initial stimulus exposure time to 250 ms, 750 ms to rule out perception constraint and the test the time course of the complexity effect. We found that the middle-level-complexity object had the best performance which could be named as “middle complexity effect”. This effect was not the result restrained by the perception and disappeared when the exposure time was prolonged to 750 ms.