Filtering Efficiency Of Visual Working Memory Under Concrete And Abstract Thinking

Extensive research shows that filtering efficiency is an important reason for visual working memory ability,and the factors affecting filtering efficiency include age,emotion,cognitive characteristics and special obstacles,etc.As an important representative of cognitive characteristics,degree of thinking abstraction will inevitably have an impact on filtering efficiency.Degree of thinking abstraction is regarded as a continuum,Individuals are always in a certain position in the continuum,and the representability of different degree of thinking abstractions is different.According to this characteristic,thinking modes can be artificially divided into two categories,one is concrete thinking with higher representability and larger number of images,and the other is abstract thinking with lower representability and smaller number of images.This study is based on the framework of construal level theory.It is expected that under abstract thinking,individuals keeping the central features of things will help to distinguish interference from targets and improve filtering efficiency,while under concrete thinking,individuals keeping the peripheral features of things will not help to filter interference from information and will reduce filtering efficiency.The study includes two experiments:(1)Experiment 1 is a within-subjects(n=66)experimental design of 3(thinking modes: baseline vs.concrete thinking vs.abstract thinking)’3(array types: 3target vs.3target3 distractions vs.6target);Thinking manipulation uses concrete words and abstract words with different abstract degrees as materials,concrete words induce concrete thinking,and abstract words induce abstract thinking;The filtering efficiency evaluation adopts the paradigm of change-detection task(CDT).The experimental results based on signal detection theory(SDT)show that the filtering efficiency of abstract thinking is significantly higher than that of baseline,but the filtering efficiency of concrete thinking is not different from that of baseline.(2)Experiment 2 is a within-subjects(n=50)experimental design of(material types:baseline vs.vocabulary vs.picture)’3(array type: 3target vs.3target3 distractions vs.6target).Experiment 2 is carried out to explore whether the material type has an impact on the abstract degree of thinking.The specific word thesaurus is randomly divided into two groups,and one group of words is converted into the corresponding pure gray physical pictures(283 ’ 283pix).Both groups of materials are used as presentation materials for thinking induction,and the experimental process and data analysis method are the same as those in Experiment 1;The results show that there is a slight difference in the abstract degree of thinking induced by vocabulary and picture materials,and the specific thinking does not have the effect of hindering filtering,but has a small promotion effect.Research conclusions: Compared with previous studies,it is found that CLT is still stable,but the different thinking preferences of different groups brought by cultural differences will affect the prediction results based on the interpretation level theory.In a word,for individuals in Chinese culture,inducing abstract thinking will significantly improve the filtering efficiency,while the blocking effect of specific thinking will be neutralized by the thinking preference effect brought by cultural factors.When the thinking preference effect is large enough,specific thinking will contribute to the filtering.