Effect of Image Captioning with Description on the Working Memory

Working memory plays an important role in human activities across academic,professional, and social settings. Working memory is dened as the memory extensively involved in goal-directed behaviors in which information must be retained and manipulated to ensure successful task execution. The aim of this research is to understand the effect of image captioning with image description on an individual's working memory. A study was conducted with eight neutral images comprising situations relatable to daily life such that each image could have a positive or negative description associated with the outcome of the situation in the image. The study consisted of three rounds where the first and second round involved two parts and the third round consisted of one part. The image was captioned a total of five times across the entire study. The findings highlighted that only 25% of participants were able to recall the captions which they captioned for an image after a span of 9-15 days; when comparing the recall rate of the captions, 50% of participants were able to recall the image caption from the previous round in the present round; and out of the positive and negative description associated with the image, 65% of participants recalled the former description rather than the latter. The conclusions drawn from the study are participants tend to retain information for longer periods than the expected duration for working memory, which may be because participants were able to relate the images with their everyday life situations and given a situation with positive and negative information, the human brain is aligned towards positive information over negative information.