The difference in subjective and objective complexity in the visual short-term memory

Several studies discuss the influence of complexity on the visual short term memory; some have demonstrated that short-term memory is surprisingly stable regardless of content (e.g. Luck & Vogel, 1997) where others have shown that memory can be influenced by the complexity of stimulus (e.g. Alvarez & Cavanagh, 2004). But the term complexity is often not clearly defined. Sørensen (2008; see also Dall, Katsumi, & Sørensen, 2016) suggested that complexity can be related to two different types; objective and subjective complexity. This distinction is supported by a number of studies on the influence of expertise (e.g. Dall, et al., 2016). We will present a paradigm testing the proposed distinction using specific isolation of attentional components (see Bundesen, 1990; Sørensen, Vangkilde, & Bundesen, 2015). We propose that objective complexity can be manipulated through the number of strokes in Chinese characters. On the contrary expertise or word frequency may reflect what could be termed subjective complexity, as this relate directly to the individual mental categories established. This study will be able to uncover more details on how we should define complexity of objects to be encoded into short-term.