Brady Timothy F, Konkle Talia, Alvarez George A, Oliva Aude
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008 Sep 23;105(38):14325-9. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0803390105. Epub 2008 Sep 11.
One of the major lessons of memory research has been that human memory is fallible, imprecise, and subject to interference. Thus, although observers can remember thousands of images, it is widely assumed that these memories lack detail. Contrary to this assumption, here we show that long-term memory is capable of storing a massive number of objects with details from the image. Participants viewed pictures of 2,500 objects over the course of 5.5 h. Afterward, they were shown pairs of images and indicated which of the two they had seen. The previously viewed item could be paired with either an object from a novel category, an object of the same basic-level category, or the same object in a different state or pose. Performance in each of these conditions was remarkably high (92%, 88%, and 87%, respectively), suggesting that participants successfully maintained detailed representations of thousands of images. These results have implications for cognitive models, in which capacity limitations impose a primary computational constraint (e.g., models of object recognition), and pose a challenge to neural models of memory storage and retrieval, which must be able to account for such a large and detailed storage capacity.
记忆研究的一个主要教训是，人类记忆是易错的、不精确的，且容易受到干扰。因此，尽管观察者能够记住成千上万张图像，但人们普遍认为这些记忆缺乏细节。与这一假设相反，我们在此表明，长期记忆能够存储大量带有图像细节的物体。参与者在5.5小时内观看了2500个物体的图片。之后，他们会看到成对的图像，并指出自己之前看过的是哪一个。之前看过的物品可以与新类别中的一个物体、同一基本级别类别的一个物体，或者处于不同状态或姿势的同一个物体配对。在每种情况下，参与者的表现都非常出色（分别为92%、88%和87%），这表明参与者成功地保留了数千张图像的详细表征。这些结果对认知模型有启示意义，在认知模型中，容量限制构成了主要的计算约束（例如，物体识别模型），同时也对记忆存储和检索的神经模型提出了挑战，这些神经模型必须能够解释如此庞大而详细的存储容量。
