No Fixed Limit for Storing Simple Visual Features: Realistic Objects Provide an Efficient Scaffold for Holding Features in Mind
通过五个实验（各30名年轻人）发现，颜色作为可识别真实物体的一部分时，视觉工作记忆容量大于不可识别物体，表明有意义物体为简单视觉特征提供有效支架。
Prominent theories of visual working memory postulate that the capacity to maintain a particular visual feature is fixed. In contrast to these theories, recent studies have demonstrated that meaningful objects are better remembered than simple, nonmeaningful stimuli. Here, we tested whether this is solely because meaningful stimuli can recruit additional features-and thus more storage capacity-or whether simple visual features that are not themselves meaningful can also benefit from being part of a meaningful object. Across five experiments (30 young adults each), we demonstrated that visual working memory capacity for color is greater when colors are part of recognizable real-world objects compared with unrecognizable objects. Our results indicate that meaningful stimuli provide a potent scaffold to help maintain simple visual feature information, possibly because they effectively increase the objects' distinctiveness from each other and reduce interference.