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No evidence for an object working memory capacity benefit in a whole-report task

Poster Session F - Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Raya Cruse¹ (), Olga Kozlova², Kirsten C.S. Adam²; ¹Eastern Connecticut State University, ²Rice University

Visual working memory (VWM) is the ability to hold and manipulate visual information in mind. Oftentimes, researchers study VWM with simplistic stimuli such as colored squares. However, several prior studies suggest that simplistic stimuli underestimate the capacity of VWM since they found an object benefit, whereby VWM performance is higher for meaningful real-world objects compared to colored squares. In this study, we sought to (1) replicate and extend the VWM object benefit in a whole-report VWM task and (2) test whether proactive interference may modulate the difference between simplistic stimuli and meaningful stimuli. In two experiments (n=26 each), we compared VWM performance for colored squares versus real-world objects. On each trial, participants remembered 6 items across a blank delay, and reported the correct binding of each item to its location at test (i.e., participants made 6 memory responses in a “whole-report” paradigm). In Experiment 1, the stimulus pools were matched between colored squares (9 possible colors) and objects (9 possible objects). In Experiment 2, the stimulus pool was smaller for colors (9 possible colors) than for objects (hundreds of trial-unique objects). In both Experiments 1 and 2, we found no evidence for an object benefit in VWM. Instead, we found a significant color benefit, such that participants remembered significantly more color-location bindings compared to object-location bindings (p<.001). Based on our results, we speculate that the object benefit effect observed in recognition tasks (e.g., 2-AFC) does not generalize to other tasks such as whole-report.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Working memory