Seminar · Cognition
Dissociating learning-induced effects of meaning and familiarity in visual working memory for Chinese characters
Nuno Busch · University of Lausanne
Wed, Mar 29, 2023 · 16:00 UTC
Visual working memory (VWM) is limited in capacity, but memorizing meaningful objects may refine this limitation. However, meaningless and meaningful stimuli usually differ perceptually and an object’s association with meaning is typically already established before the actual experiment. We applied a strict control over these potential confounds by asking observers (N=45) to actively learn associations of (initially) meaningless objects. To this end, a change detection task presented Chinese characters, which were meaningless to our observers. Subsequently, half of the characters were consist