Woodman Geoffrey F, Vogel Edward K, Luck Steven J
Vanderbilt University.
Vis cogn. 2012 Jan 13;20(1):1-28. doi: 10.1080/13506285.2011.630694.
Many recent studies of visual working memory have used change-detection tasks in which subjects view sequential displays and are asked to report whether they are identical or if one object has changed. A key question is whether the memory system used to perform this task is sufficiently flexible to detect changes in object identity independent of spatial transformations, but previous research has yielded contradictory results. To address this issue, the present study compared standard change-detection tasks with tasks in which the objects varied in size or position between successive arrays. Performance was nearly identical across the standard and transformed tasks unless the task implicitly encouraged spatial encoding. These results resolve the discrepancies in prior studies and demonstrate that the visual working memory system can detect changes in object identity across spatial transformations.
近期许多关于视觉工作记忆的研究都采用了变化检测任务，即让受试者观看一系列显示屏，并要求他们报告这些显示屏是否相同，或者是否有一个物体发生了变化。一个关键问题是，用于执行此任务的记忆系统是否足够灵活，能够独立于空间变换检测物体身份的变化，但先前的研究得出了相互矛盾的结果。为了解决这个问题，本研究将标准变化检测任务与物体在连续阵列之间大小或位置不同的任务进行了比较。除非任务隐含地鼓励空间编码，否则标准任务和变换任务的表现几乎相同。这些结果解决了先前研究中的差异，并表明视觉工作记忆系统可以检测跨空间变换的物体身份变化。
