The Relative Contributions of Conceptual and Perceptual Information to Visual Memory

conceptual information perceptual information false recognition output interferenceVisual memory contains conceptual and perceptual information, but existing evidence regarding their relative contributions is sparse and inconsistent.In the current study, we conducted a thorough experiment to see whether conceptual and perceptual information are encoded and retrieved the same to produce similar levels of false recognition and output interference (declining memory performance during testing).Participants studied images under different study times (20/500/2000 ms) and encoding tasks (conceptual/perceptual). Participants were tested with targets and foils with different levels of similarity to targets.We observed that foils with low conceptual similarity and high perceptual similarity (CLPH) and foils with high conceptual similarity and low perceptual similarity (CHPL) produced similar levels of false recognition and output interference when study time was 2000 ms and when the encoding task was perceptual-oriented.However, when study time was 20 ms or 500 ms and the encoding task focused on conceptual information, the CHPL foils produced a larger false alarm rate than the CLPH foils.The 20 ms and conceptual conditions also produced a larger decrease in false alarm rate (greater output interference) for the CHPL foils.The results indicate that, under a brief study time and a conceptual-oriented study procedure, conceptual information is encoded more strongly than perceptual information to play a more vital role in visual memory.We apply visual and verbal memory theories to account for our findings and show the potential to represent and describe memory processes across modalities using models of spreading activation and differentiation.