Abstract
Visual short-term memory (VSTM) is assumed as holding initial visual information such as colors, shapes, and sizes temporally. Previous studies suggested that stored visual objects as VSTM approximately were limited to four types of patterns, and this is called VSTM capacity. In contrast, VSTM capacity is known as being inversely related to the perceptual complexity, indicating the estimated capacity decreased for more complex stimuli. Present study investigates the characteristics of objects’ features which influence the capacity and complexity of objects in VSTM, by changing their colored/monochrome as coloredness and 2-dimensional/3-dimensional in shapes as mental dimensionality. Tasks for participants were following two types: a visual search task and a change-detection task. As a result, the coloredness affects VSTM capacity, however, mental dimensionality has no such effects. We conclude that VSTM is influenced by primitive features of objects such as color but not visually complex features such as mental dimensionality.
