Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2010 Aug;139(3):558-78. doi: 10.1037/a0019165.
Humans have a massive capacity to store detailed information in visual long-term memory. The present studies explored the fidelity of these visual long-term memory representations and examined how conceptual and perceptual features of object categories support this capacity. Observers viewed 2,800 object images with a different number of exemplars presented from each category. At test, observers indicated which of 2 exemplars they had previously studied. Memory performance was high and remained quite high (82% accuracy) with 16 exemplars from a category in memory, demonstrating a large memory capacity for object exemplars. However, memory performance decreased as more exemplars were held in memory, implying systematic categorical interference. Object categories with conceptually distinctive exemplars showed less interference in memory as the number of exemplars increased. Interference in memory was not predicted by the perceptual distinctiveness of exemplars from an object category, though these perceptual measures predicted visual search rates for an object target among exemplars. These data provide evidence that observers' capacity to remember visual information in long-term memory depends more on conceptual structure than perceptual distinctiveness.
人类具有在视觉长期记忆中存储详细信息的巨大能力。本研究探索了这些视觉长期记忆表征的保真度，并研究了对象类别中的概念和感知特征如何支持这种能力。观察者观看了 2800 个对象图像，每个类别呈现不同数量的示例。在测试中，观察者指出他们之前研究过的 2 个示例中的哪一个。记忆表现很高，并且在记忆中有 16 个示例的情况下仍然非常高（82%的准确率），这表明对象示例具有很大的记忆容量。然而，随着更多示例存储在记忆中，记忆表现下降，这意味着存在系统的类别干扰。具有概念上独特示例的对象类别，随着示例数量的增加，记忆中的干扰较小。记忆中的干扰不能由对象类别中示例的感知独特性来预测，尽管这些感知措施可以预测在示例中寻找对象目标的视觉搜索率。这些数据提供了证据，表明观察者在长期记忆中记住视觉信息的能力更多地取决于概念结构而不是感知独特性。
