An investigation of the electrophysiological underpinnings of the effect of strategies on visual working memory capacity in young and older adults.

Visual short-term (‘working’) memory is the limited capacity cognitive system responsible for temporarily storing and processing visual information over periods of seconds (Baddeley, 2012; Cowan 2017; Logie et al., 2021). Strategies are procedures that can be used to perform memory tasks (Lemaire, 2016; Lemaire & Reder, 1999) and that impact capacity (Laine et al., 2024). Large individual differences in strategy use during memory task performance have been observed, with some participants using more effective strategies than others (Bailey et al., 2011; Dunlosky & Kane, 2007). Our understanding of cognitive strategies is still limited (Lemaire, 2016; von Bastian et al., 2022), but the strategies that are most consistently associated with higher memory performance are elaborative or semantic strategies. These approaches involve manipulating memory contents and creating associations to strengthen the memory trace (e.g., Laine et al., 2024; McNamara & Scott, 2001). Semantic availability within visual stimuli may affect strategy use and performance (Brown & Wesley, 2013; Hamilton et al., 2018; Hart & Nicholls, 2025; Nicholls & English, 2020; Nicholls & Stewart, 2023; Riby & Orme, 2013). This is because meaningful patterns may automatically activate semantic representations (Logie, 2011; see also Forsberg et al., 2019). For example, existing neural evidence shows that high semantic visual matrix patterns are associated with less early-stage/low-level processing and lower memory encoding load (Riby & Orme, 2013). Importantly, visual working memory is also highly age-sensitive (Johnson et al., 2010) and studies have found that older adults typically use a less effective strategic approach compared to young adults during working memory tasks. Therefore, older adults’ spontaneous strategies may be contributing to their lower capacity (Hart & Nicholls, 2025; Nicholls & English, 2020). Our key objective is to explore the electrophysiological underpinnings of the effect of strategies on visual working memory capacity in young and older adults. More work is needed to understand the neural drivers of the successful implementation of strategies during visual working memory tasks. This will shed light on the cognitive mechanisms associated with successful performance and may help inform the future development of effective strategy training protocols. We will assess participants' spontaneous use of strategies based on existing literature (e.g., verbalisation, visual rehearsal). We will then establish any strategies that are positively related to working memory performance. We will closely follow the paradigm of Riby and Orme (2013), which investigated event-related potential (ERP) components associated with memory encoding for visual matrix patterns (e.g., Della Sala et al., 1997, 1999) which were either low (i.e., abstract) or high (i.e., more meaningful) in semantic availability (e.g., Brown et al., 2006). Importantly, we will build upon this work by additionally investigating the effects of strategy use and age group.