Abstract
Visual working memory is a cognitive system which allows the active manipulation of visual information. Although known as a highly limited system, visual working memory has a flexible capacity that depends on both the meaningfulness of the encoded items (e.g., more meaningful objects are better remembered than meaningless stimuli), as well as the presentation style of the stimuli at encoding (e.g., simultaneous vs. sequential encoding). Investigating the intersection of meaningfulness and encoding strategies on working memory performance, Brady and Störmer (2021) found that sequential presentations encouraged deeper processing that benefited more meaningful stimuli like real-world objects, whereas simultaneous presentations encouraged a ‘gist like’ extraction that is less beneficial for remembering meaningful stimuli but more beneficial for less meaningless stimuli like colored dots. However, it is unclear whether less complex but still meaningful low-level stimuli — such as digital numbers — would also show this same pattern of results. The current study investigates whether upright (i.e., fully meaningful) numbers are remembered better than less meaningful rotated numbers, and whether encoding strategy influences these stimuli similarly to complex and scrambled objects. Preliminary results (N=95) suggest that upright numbers were remembered better than rotated ones in both simultaneous and sequential conditions, showing an advantage for meaningfulness in working memory. The advantage for upright numbers was larger in the simultaneous condition than the sequential one. This result may be driven by a strategy observers could use in the experiment — namely, mentally rotating the numbers from rotated to upright — which would be expected to benefit from the sequential exposure condition. Overall, these results provide insights into how encoding strategy and stimulus class influence visual working memory performance.