Grouping by semantic and color similarity in visual working memory: An attentional mechanism, not compression mechanism

Ramzaoui, Hanane, Mathy, Fabien and Morey, Candice C. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7644-5239 2025. Grouping by semantic and color similarity in visual working memory: An attentional mechanism, not compression mechanism. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 10.1037/xlm0001482

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Abstract

Few studies have examined whether semantic relatedness between objects can influence object grouping, thereby optimizing the efficiency of visual working memory (WM). Moreover, these studies have largely used real-world greyscale objects. Here, we sought to determine whether and how sharing object semantics and colors would benefit WM. Participants viewed six tobe- remembered objects, arranged as one semantically-related and/or perceptually-similar object pair plus four singletons, or as six singletons. Perceptually-similar pairs shared color, while semantically-related pairs included co-occurring objects. Our series of three experiments mainly showed redundancy advantages, with memory of related objects improved over that of singletons. This advantage was present for similarly colored objects in all experiments, and under conditions that allowed deeper information processing by facilitating access to knowledge (longer encoding or retention times), extended to semantically related objects. None of the experiments showed any redundancy-boost on overall WM performance, with memory for scenes comprising a related pair not differing from that for scenes comprising only singletons. The experiments also showed no capacity spillover for singletons in the presence of pairs. Overall, the results support the existence of an attentional encoding bias and rule out the compression hypothesis to explain the benefits of grouping by semantic and color similarity.

Item Type:	Article
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > Psychology
Publisher:	American Psychological Association
ISSN:	0278-7393
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	14 February 2025
Date of Acceptance:	2 February 2025
Last Modified:	06 Mar 2025 10:15
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/176213

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