Vanderbilt University, Vanderbilt Vision Research Center, Center for Integrative and Cognitive Neuroscience, Nashville, TN 37240-7817, USA.
J Neurosci. 2011 Jun 22;31(25):9315-22. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1097-11.2011.
Most theories of attention propose that we maintain attentional templates in visual working memory to control what information is selected. In the present study, we directly tested this proposal by measuring the contralateral-delay activity (CDA) of human event-related potentials during visual search tasks in which the target is cued on each trial. Here we show that the CDA can be used to measure the maintenance of attentional templates in visual working memory while processing complex visual scenes. In addition, this method allowed us to directly observe the shift from working memory to long-term memory representations controlling attention as learning occurred and experience accrued searching for the same target object. Our findings provide definitive support for several critical proposals made in theories of attention, learning, and automaticity.
大多数注意力理论都提出,我们在视觉工作记忆中保持注意力模板,以控制哪些信息被选择。在本研究中,我们通过在视觉搜索任务中测量人类事件相关电位的对侧延迟活动(CDA),直接测试了这一假设,其中目标在每次试验中都有提示。在这里,我们表明,CDA 可以用于测量在处理复杂视觉场景时,注意力模板在视觉工作记忆中的保持情况。此外,这种方法使我们能够直接观察到,随着学习的发生和经验的积累,注意力从工作记忆到长期记忆表示的转变,以便搜索相同的目标对象。我们的发现为注意力、学习和自动性理论中的几个关键假设提供了明确的支持。