Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, USA.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2012 Apr;38(2):429-38. doi: 10.1037/a0023925. Epub 2011 May 30.
Although considerable research has examined the storage limits of visual short-term memory (VSTM), little is known about the initial formation (i.e., the consolidation) of VSTM representations. A few previous studies have estimated the capacity of consolidation to be one item at a time. Here we used a sequential-simultaneous manipulation to reexamine the limits of consolidating items into VSTM. Participants viewed briefly presented and masked color patches (targets), which were shown either sequentially or simultaneously. A probe color followed the targets and participants decided whether it matched one of the targets or was a novel color. In four experiments, we consistently found equal performance for sequential and simultaneous presentations for two targets. Worse performance in the simultaneous than the sequential condition was observed for larger set sizes (three and four). Contrary to previous results, suggesting a severe capacity limit of one item, our results indicate that consolidation into VSTM can occur in parallel and without capacity limits for at least two items.
尽管已经有相当多的研究考察了视觉短期记忆 (VSTM) 的存储限制，但对于 VSTM 表示的初始形成（即巩固）知之甚少。之前的一些研究估计，每次可以将一个项目整合到 VSTM 中。在这里，我们使用顺序-同时操作来重新检查将项目整合到 VSTM 中的限制。参与者短暂地观看了呈现和掩蔽的彩色补丁（目标），这些目标以顺序或同时的方式显示。在目标之后出现一个探针颜色，参与者决定它是否与一个目标匹配或是否为新颜色。在四个实验中，我们一致发现两个目标的顺序和同时呈现的表现相等。对于更大的集合大小（三到四个），同时呈现的表现比顺序呈现的表现更差。与之前的结果相反，表明一个项目的严重容量限制，我们的结果表明，至少两个项目的 VSTM 整合可以并行进行，而没有容量限制。
