Saturation and brightness modulate the effect of depth on visual working memory

Although previous studies show inconsistent results regarding the effect of depth perception on visual working memory (VWM), a recent finding shows that perceptually closer-in-depth items are better remembered than farther items when combining the congruent disparity and relative size cues. In this study, we employed a similar change detection paradigm to investigate the effects of saturation and brightness, alone or in combination with binocular disparity, on VWM. By varying the appearance of the memory items, we aimed to manipulate the visual salience as well as to simulate the aerial perspective cue that induces depth perception. We found that the change detection accuracy was significantly improved for brighter and more saturated items, but not for items solely with higher saturation. Additionally, combining saturation with the congruent disparity cue significantly improved memory performance for perceptually closer items over farther items. Conflicting the disparity cue with saturation eliminated the memory benefit for the closer items. These results indicate that saturation and brightness could modulate the effect of depth on VWM, and both visual salience and depth perception affect VWM possibly through a common underlying mechanism of setting priority for attentional selection.