Semantic knowledge influences visual working memory in adults and children

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0241110

23 3 6 years ago

journals.plos.org

ilaksh• 6 years ago

It seems like that would follow if the working memory was leveraging existing long-term memories, since there would be less storage or work required to hold something like a "long term index ID" and/or residual than to store information about something more novel that could not really reference long-term memory to the same degree.

runnedrun• 6 years ago

I'd be really interested in how the authors (and researchers in general) measure semantic richness. The paper mentions that semantic richness seems to influence visual working memory (familiar but otherwise random geometric shapes are harder than celebrity faces). However, how do you know when an image is semantically rich for a given subject? Similarly, how did the researchers know when the experimental images were morphed enough to be semantically unrecognizable?

jjk166• 6 years ago

This sounds to me more like a difference in compressibility than a difference in memory capacity. If you know what an airplane is and have a mental model of it in your mind, you need only store the differences between this particular airplane and the general model. On the other hand if you have never seen an airplane before, most of your efforts are going to be focused on storing this weird tube shape with little things poking out the sides. Yeah if you count capacity by the number of files you can store, you have increased capacity, but that's a weird way, at least in my opinion, to look at it.

Semantic knowledge influences visual working memory in adults and children

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