Mayer Jutta S, Bittner Robert A, Linden David E J, Nikolić Danko
Laboratory for Neurophysiology and Neuroimaging, Department of Psychiatry, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University, Frankfurt, Germany.
Adv Cogn Psychol. 2008 Jul 15;3(4):429-48. doi: 10.2478/v10053-008-0007-2.
Visual selective attention and visual working memory (WM) share the same capacity-limited resources. We investigated whether and how participants can cope with a task in which these 2 mechanisms interfere. The task required participants to scan an array of 9 objects in order to select the target locations and to encode the items presented at these locations into WM (1 to 5 shapes). Determination of the target locations required either few attentional resources ("popout condition") or an attention-demanding serial search ("non pop-out condition"). Participants were able to achieve high memory performance in all stimulation conditions but, in the non popout conditions, this came at the cost of additional processing time. Both empirical evidence and subjective reports suggest that participants invested the additional time in memorizing the locations of all target objects prior to the encoding of their shapes into WM. Thus, they seemed to be unable to interleave the steps of search with those of encoding. We propose that the memory for target locations substitutes for perceptual pop-out and thus may be the key component that allows for flexible coping with the common processing limitations of visual WM and attention. The findings have implications for understanding how we cope with real-life situations in which the demands on visual attention and WM occur simultaneously.
视觉选择性注意和视觉工作记忆（WM）共享相同的容量有限的资源。我们研究了参与者是否以及如何应对这两种机制相互干扰的任务。该任务要求参与者扫描一组9个物体，以选择目标位置并将这些位置呈现的项目编码到工作记忆中（1到5个形状）。确定目标位置要么需要很少的注意力资源（“弹出条件”），要么需要大量注意力的串行搜索（“非弹出条件”）。参与者在所有刺激条件下都能实现高记忆表现，但在非弹出条件下，这是以额外的处理时间为代价的。实证证据和主观报告均表明，参与者在将目标物体的形状编码到工作记忆之前，投入了额外的时间来记忆所有目标物体的位置。因此，他们似乎无法将搜索步骤与编码步骤交错进行。我们提出，对目标位置的记忆替代了感知弹出，因此可能是允许灵活应对视觉工作记忆和注意力共同处理限制的关键组成部分。这些发现对于理解我们如何应对视觉注意力和工作记忆需求同时出现的现实生活情况具有启示意义。
