The storage of physical and name properties in short-term visual memory

Two experiments investigated the hypothesis that short-term visual memory is based primarily on physical features of the visual input. Subjects were required to recall visually presented figures or the names of those figures presented either visually or aurally at a number of different retention intervals. Subjects shadowed words during the retention interval presented aurally in Experiment I and visually in Experiment II. In both experiments, figures were recalled better than names and no differences in recall of names were found due to presentation modality. Recall of both names conditions showed a steady decline across retention intervals whereas recall of figures remained at a relatively high level. These findings were interpreted as providing further support for the existence of short-term visual memory not subject to auditory recoding and based primarily on physical features of the input. It was suggested that such visual memory is limited in capacity so that input exceeding this capacity is recoded into an auditory-verbal-linguistic form.