Magnotti John F, Goodman Adam M, Daniel Thomas A, Elmore L Caitlin, Wright Anthony A, Katz Jeffrey S
Department of Psychology, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, USA.
Behav Processes. 2013 Feb;93:31-8. doi: 10.1016/j.beproc.2012.10.006. Epub 2012 Oct 23.
The study of visual memory has repeatedly shown qualitatively similar visual short-term memory (VSTM) systems between human and many nonhuman species. In studies of human VSTM using change detection, increasing visual object complexity has an inverse effect on accuracy. In the current study, we assessed the functional relationship between visual object complexity and memory performance in visual change detection in pigeons and humans. Visual object complexity was quantified for each object type within each species using visual target search. Change detection performance was inversely related to object complexity in both species, suggesting that pigeon VSTM, like human VSTM, is limited by visual object complexity. Human participants were able to use a verbal-labeling strategy to mitigate some of the effect of visual object complexity, suggesting a qualitative difference in how the two species may solve certain visual discriminations. Considering the visual complexity of novel objects may also help explain previous failures to transfer relational rules to novel visual objects.
对视觉记忆的研究反复表明，人类和许多非人类物种之间在视觉短期记忆（VSTM）系统上存在质的相似性。在使用变化检测的人类VSTM研究中，视觉对象复杂性的增加对准确性有相反的影响。在当前的研究中，我们评估了鸽子和人类在视觉变化检测中视觉对象复杂性与记忆表现之间的功能关系。使用视觉目标搜索对每个物种内的每种对象类型的视觉对象复杂性进行了量化。变化检测表现与两个物种中的对象复杂性均呈负相关，这表明鸽子的VSTM与人类的VSTM一样，受到视觉对象复杂性的限制。人类参与者能够使用言语标记策略来减轻视觉对象复杂性的一些影响，这表明两个物种在解决某些视觉辨别问题的方式上存在质的差异。考虑新对象的视觉复杂性也可能有助于解释先前在将关系规则转移到新视觉对象上的失败。
