Sant'Anna Pereira, M. & Galera, C.
Department of Psychobiology. University of Sao Paulo. Ribeirao Preto. Brazil
Working memory is involved in an important range of everyday tasks such as learning, reading, comprehension, argumentation, decision making and reasoning. This short term system allows us to perform the storage and manipulation of information simultaneously, while a particular cognitive task is performed. This study aimed to investigate the effects of dynamic visual noise (DVN) and static visual noise (SVN) on visual working memory. The task was to recognize colors and shades. Thus, one color was presented on the center of the screen and after a short interval of time, it was showed a second color. The participants had to judge whether the two showed colors were the same or different. During the interval, the participants stood staring at the screen that could be white (control) or filled by the visual noise (static or dynamic). The partial results showed that participants performance was impaired by the presence of noise. However, there was no difference between the DVN and SVN conditions, suggesting that the noise affected the visual memory task performance, regardless of its nature.