Yale University, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2013 Apr;24(4):569-74. doi: 10.1177/0956797612457577. Epub 2013 Mar 4.
In the present study, the effect of memory suppression on subsequent perceptual processing of visual objects was examined within a modified think/no-think paradigm. Suppressing memories of visual objects significantly impaired subsequent perceptual identification of those objects when they were briefly encountered (Experiment 1) and when they were presented in noise (Experiment 2), relative to performance on baseline items for which participants did not undergo suppression training. However, in Experiment 3, when perceptual identification was performed on mirror-reversed images of to-be-suppressed objects, no impairment was observed. These findings, analogous to those showing forgetting of suppressed words in long-term memory, suggest that suppressing memories of visual objects might be mediated by direct inhibition of perceptual representations, which, in turn, impairs later perception of them. This study provides strong support for the role of inhibitory mechanisms in memory control and suggests a tight link between higher-order cognitive operations and perceptual processing.
在本研究中，我们在改良的思维反刍范式内，考察了记忆抑制对视觉对象后续知觉加工的影响。与未进行抑制训练的基线项目相比，当被试短暂地遇到（实验 1）或在噪声中呈现（实验 2）抑制记忆的视觉对象时，抑制记忆会显著损害他们对这些对象的后续知觉识别。然而，在实验 3 中，当对要抑制的对象的镜像反转图像进行知觉识别时，没有观察到损害。这些发现类似于在长期记忆中抑制词遗忘的发现，表明抑制视觉对象的记忆可能是通过直接抑制知觉表象来介导的，这反过来又损害了他们的后续知觉。这项研究为记忆控制中抑制机制的作用提供了有力的支持，并表明高阶认知操作与知觉加工之间存在紧密联系。
