The Effect of Perceptual Expertise on Visual Short-Term Memory

Visual working memory (VWM) capacity is larger for faces than other complex objects. Inversion reduces capacity for faces more than nonfaces (Curby and Gauthier, 2007). These findings suggest that VWM is influenced by the encoding processes employed by face experts. Scolari, Vogel and Awh (2008) found that perceptual expertise enables a more detailed memory, instead of a larger WM capacity, for faces than nonfaces. Since people are more expert at recognizing own-race than other-race faces, we investigated whether this advantage is due to a higher resolution of own-race face representations. Six study items (Chinese and Caucasian faces, shaded cubes) were simultaneously shown on screen on each trial. After a short delay, a single image was presented. Participants were asked to judge whether this image was the same or different from the item that originally appeared in that location. Neither own-race nor other-race faces showed an inversion effect when stimuli changed between categories (face to cube, cube to face). However, an inversion effect was found for both own-race and other-race faces when changes occurred within a category (face to face, cube to cube). These results suggest that both own-race and other-race faces are stored with high resolution in working memory.