Bao Min, Li Zhi-Hao, Zhang Da-Ren
Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale and School of Life Sciences, University of Science and Technologyof China, Hefei, Anhui, China.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2007 Sep;33(5):959-69. doi: 10.1037/0278-7393.33.5.959.
The authors investigated the units of selective attention within working memory. In Experiment 1, a group of participants kept 1 count and 1 location in working memory and updated them repeatedly in random order. Another group of participants were instructed to achieve the same goal by memorizing the verbal and spatial information in an integrative way as a moving digit. The behavioral data showed that switching attention between properties of an integrated working-memory item was faster than switching between respective properties of different items. Experiment 2 demonstrated that this switching facilitation cannot be simply ascribed to the different amount of working-memory items maintained by the two groups of participants. Finally, by adopting a pure verbal task in Experiment 3, the authors observed the same binding facilitation, with the possibility of "location-based selection" excluded. They summarize the observations of all 3 experiments in the study and suggest both a location- and object-based mechanism for attention selection in working memory.
作者们研究了工作记忆中选择性注意的单元。在实验1中，一组参与者在工作记忆中保留1个计数和1个位置，并以随机顺序反复更新它们。另一组参与者被指示通过将言语和空间信息作为一个移动数字进行整合记忆来实现相同的目标。行为数据表明，在整合的工作记忆项目的属性之间切换注意力比在不同项目的各自属性之间切换更快。实验2表明，这种切换促进作用不能简单地归因于两组参与者所维持的工作记忆项目数量的不同。最后，在实验3中通过采用一个纯言语任务，作者们观察到了相同的绑定促进作用，排除了“基于位置的选择”的可能性。他们总结了该研究中所有3个实验的观察结果，并提出了工作记忆中注意力选择的基于位置和基于对象的机制。
