University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA.
Neuropsychologia. 2011 May;49(6):1632-9. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.11.031. Epub 2010 Dec 8.
The integrated object view of visual working memory (WM) argues that objects (rather than features) are the building block of visual WM, so that adding an extra feature to an object does not result in any extra cost to WM capacity. Alternative views have shown that complex objects consume additional WM storage capacity so that it may not be represented as bound objects. Additionally, it was argued that two features from the same dimension (i.e., color-color) do not form an integrated object in visual WM. This led some to argue for a "weak" object view of visual WM. We used the contralateral delay activity (the CDA) as an electrophysiological marker of WM capacity, to test those alternative hypotheses to the integrated object account. In two experiments we presented complex stimuli and color-color conjunction stimuli, and compared performance in displays that had one object but varying degrees of feature complexity. The results supported the integrated object account by showing that the CDA amplitude corresponded to the number of objects regardless of the number of features within each object, even for complex objects or color-color conjunction stimuli.
视觉工作记忆（WM）的整体对象视图认为，对象（而不是特征）是视觉 WM 的构建块，因此向对象添加额外的特征不会对 WM 容量造成任何额外的负担。替代观点表明，复杂的对象会消耗额外的 WM 存储容量，因此它们可能不会被表示为绑定对象。此外，有人认为来自同一维度的两个特征（即颜色-颜色）不会在视觉 WM 中形成一个集成的对象。这导致一些人认为视觉 WM 的对象视图较弱。我们使用对侧延迟活动（CDA）作为 WM 容量的电生理标志物，来测试对整体对象解释的替代假设。在两项实验中，我们呈现了复杂的刺激和颜色-颜色结合刺激，并比较了具有一个对象但特征复杂性不同的显示中的表现。结果支持了整体对象解释，表明 CDA 幅度与对象的数量相对应，而与每个对象中的特征数量无关，即使对于复杂对象或颜色-颜色结合刺激也是如此。
