The School of Psychology, The University of New South Wales Sydney, NSW, Australia ; Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan Cachan, France.
Front Psychol. 2012 Sep 25;3:355. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00355. eCollection 2012.
a high-capacity, short-lived iconic memory followed by a limited-capacity visual working memory that can last many seconds. Whereas a large number of studies have investigated visual working memory for low-level sensory features, much research on iconic memory has used more "high-level" alphanumeric stimuli such as letters or numbers. These two forms of memory are typically examined separately, despite an intrinsic overlap in their characteristics. Here, we used a purely sensory paradigm to examine visual short-term memory for 10 homogeneous items of three different visual features (color, orientation and motion) across a range of durations from 0 to 6 s. We found that the amount of information stored in iconic memory is smaller for motion than for color or orientation. Performance declined exponentially with longer storage durations and reached chance levels after ∼2 s. Further experiments showed that performance for the 10 items at 1 s was contingent on unperturbed attentional resources. In addition, for orientation stimuli, performance was contingent on the location of stimuli in the visual field, especially for short cue delays. Overall, our results suggest a smooth transition between an automatic, high-capacity, feature-specific sensory-iconic memory, and an effortful "lower-capacity" visual working memory.
高容量、短暂的表象记忆，以及容量有限、可持续数秒的视觉工作记忆。虽然有大量研究调查了低水平感觉特征的视觉工作记忆，但许多关于表象记忆的研究都使用了更“高级”的字母或数字等字母数字刺激。尽管这两种记忆形式在特征上存在内在重叠，但它们通常是分开检查的。在这里，我们使用纯粹的感觉范式，在 0 到 6 秒的不同时间范围内，检查了三种不同视觉特征（颜色、方向和运动）的 10 个同质项目的视觉短期记忆。我们发现，在表象记忆中，运动的存储信息量比颜色或方向小。随着存储时间的延长，性能呈指数级下降，大约 2 秒后达到随机水平。进一步的实验表明，在 1 秒时，10 个项目的表现取决于不受干扰的注意力资源。此外，对于方向刺激，表现取决于刺激在视野中的位置，尤其是在短提示延迟时。总体而言，我们的结果表明，在自动、高容量、特定于特征的感觉表象记忆和费力的“低容量”视觉工作记忆之间存在平稳过渡。
