Visual Working Memory of Chinese Characters and Expertise: The Expert's Memory Advantage Is Based on Long-Term Knowledge of Visual Word Forms.

ABSTRACT: People unfamiliar with Chinese characters show poorer visual working memory (VWM) performance for Chinese characters than do literates in Chinese. In a series of experiments, we investigated the reasons for this expertise advantage. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the advantage of Chinese literates does not transfer to novel material. Experts had similar resolution as novices for material outside of their field of expertise, and the memory of novices and experts did not differ when detecting a big change, e.g., when a character's color was changed. Memorizing appears to function as a rather abstract representation of word forms because memory for characters' fonts was poor independently of expertise (Experiment 3), though still visual. Distractors that were highly similar conceptually did

SUBMITTER: Zimmer HD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7180225 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature