Shen Kelly, McIntosh Anthony R, Ryan Jennifer D
Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest, Toronto, Canada.
Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest, Toronto, Canada Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
J Vis. 2014 Dec 19;14(14):11. doi: 10.1167/14.14.11.
We tested the hypothesis that active exploration of the visual environment is mediated not only by visual attention but also by visual working memory (VWM) by examining performance in both a visual search and a change detection task. Subjects rarely fixated previously examined distracters during visual search, suggesting that they successfully retained those items. Change detection accuracy decreased with increasing set size, suggesting that subjects had a limited VWM capacity. Crucially, performance in the change detection task predicted visual search efficiency: Higher VWM capacity was associated with faster and more accurate responses as well as lower probabilities of refixation. We found no temporal delay for return saccades, suggesting that active vision is primarily mediated by VWM rather than by a separate attentional disengagement mechanism commonly associated with the inhibition-of-return (IOR) effect. Taken together with evidence that visual attention, VWM, and the oculomotor system involve overlapping neural networks, these data suggest that there exists a general capacity for cognitive processing.
我们通过在视觉搜索和变化检测任务中检验表现，测试了这样一个假设：对视觉环境的主动探索不仅由视觉注意力介导，还由视觉工作记忆（VWM）介导。在视觉搜索过程中，受试者很少注视先前检查过的干扰项，这表明他们成功地记住了那些项目。变化检测的准确性随着集合大小的增加而降低，这表明受试者的VWM容量有限。至关重要的是，变化检测任务中的表现预测了视觉搜索效率：更高的VWM容量与更快、更准确的反应以及更低的重新注视概率相关。我们没有发现返回扫视的时间延迟，这表明主动视觉主要由VWM介导，而不是由通常与返回抑制（IOR）效应相关的单独的注意力脱离机制介导。结合视觉注意力、VWM和眼动系统涉及重叠神经网络的证据，这些数据表明存在一种一般的认知处理能力。
