Learning-Induced Plasticity Enhances the Capacity of Visual Working Memory.

Visual working memory (VWM) is limited in capacity, though memorizing meaningful objects may refine this limitation. However, meaningful and meaningless stimuli typically differ perceptually, and objects' associations with meaning are usually already established outside the laboratory, potentially confounding experimental findings. Here, in two experiments with young adults ( = 45 and = 20), we controlled for these influences by having observers actively learn associations of (for them) initially meaningless stimuli: Chinese characters, half of which were consistently paired with pictures of animals or everyday objects in a learning phase.