Abstract

A probe recognition technique was used to examine the decay vs. rehearsal hypothesis of the visual short-term memory. In order to test the effect of visual memory span, three experiments were performed, respectively with three, five, and seven serially presented visual stimuli. These stimuli were randomly sampled from a pool of twelve mutually distinguishable schematic faces varing along three stimulus dimensions. Dependent measure of the experiments was the rate of correct recognition for the target stimulus immediately following a probe stimulus. From the experiments, it was found that the rate of stimulus presentation did not have significant effect, which implies that neither decay nor rehearsal of the visual memory may occur. Recognition performance became worse as the number of interfering items increased suggesting the effect of the limited structural capacity of the visual short-term memory. This effect of limited structural capacity was also confirmed in the comparison among the recognition performances from the three experiments. In general, the results suggest that the structure of visual short-term memory can be characterized by its limited capacity.