Remembering expertise: How our long-term memory dictates our present

How and what information we store in our Visual Short-Term Memory (VSTM) has been extensively explored, particularly in recent years (e.g., Bundesen, 1987; Schurgin et al., 2020; Zhang & Luck, 2008). Extending Sørensen and Kyllingsbæk (2012) we present a series of behavioural experiments that demonstrate how expertise influences what we see (Experiment 1-3) and in what order it is perceived (Experiment 4). In the first experiment Dall, Watanabe, & Sørensen (2016) examined how expertise influenced VSTM for Japanese Hiragana in participants at different levels of language expertise. Secondly, Dall et al. (2021) studied the relationship between the physical and perceived complexity (Jackson & Raymond, 2005) using Chinese characters and thirdly how stimuli specific expertise influenced both amount encoded and precision of stimuli in VSTM (Dall & Sørensen, 2019). Finally, Experiment 4 explore how expertise affect asynchronously presented stimuli in VSTM (Dall & Sørensen, in press).
We find that expertise influences VSTM capacity to the point where it is not influenced by visual complexity, nevertheless it does not seem to influence the precision of representation in VSTM. In addition, we find a bias towards remembering high expertise stimuli when presented alongside low expertise stimuli.