University of Leeds, UK.
Cognition. 2012 Feb;122(2):258-63. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.10.015. Epub 2011 Nov 21.
Humans have the ability to attentionally select the most relevant visual information from their extrapersonal world and to retain it in a temporary buffer, known as visual short-term memory (VSTM). Research suggests that at least two non-contiguous items can be selected simultaneously when they are distributed across the two visual hemifields. In two experiments, we show that attention can also be split between the left and right sides of internal representations held in VSTM. Participants were asked to remember several colors, while cues presented during the delay instructed them to orient their attention to a subset of memorized colors. Experiment 1 revealed that orienting attention to one or two colors strengthened equally participants' memory for those colors, but only when they were from separate hemifields. Experiment 2 showed that in the absence of attentional cues the distribution of the items in the visual field per se had no effect on memory. These findings strongly suggest the existence of independent attentional resources in the two hemifields for selecting and/or consolidating information in VSTM.
人类具有从外部世界中选择性地注意到最相关视觉信息并将其保留在临时缓冲区（即视觉短期记忆，VSTM）中的能力。研究表明，当两个不连续的项目分布在两个视觉半视野时，它们可以被同时选择。在两项实验中，我们表明，注意力也可以在 VSTM 中保持的内部表示的左右两侧之间进行分割。要求参与者记住几种颜色，而在延迟期间呈现的提示则指导他们将注意力集中在记忆中颜色的子集上。实验 1 表明，将注意力集中在一个或两个颜色上同样可以增强参与者对这些颜色的记忆，但前提是它们来自不同的半视野。实验 2 表明，在没有注意力提示的情况下，视野中项目的分布本身对记忆没有影响。这些发现强烈表明，在选择和/或巩固 VSTM 中的信息时，两个半视野中存在独立的注意力资源。
