Ding Xiaowei, Zhao Yangfan, Wu Fan, Lu Xiqian, Gao Zaifeng, Shen Mowei
Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2015 Jun;41(3):850-65. doi: 10.1037/xhp0000061. Epub 2015 Apr 20.
Working memory mechanisms for binding have been examined extensively in the last decade, yet few studies have explored bindings relating to human biological motion (BM). Human BM is the most salient and biologically significant kinetic information encountered in everyday life and is stored independently from other visual features (e.g., colors). The current study explored 3 critical issues of BM-related binding in working memory: (a) how many BM binding units can be retained in working memory, (b) whether involuntarily object-based binding occurs during BM binding, and (c) whether the maintenance of BM bindings in working memory requires attention above and beyond that needed to maintain the constituent dimensions. We isolated motion signals of human BM from non-BM sources by using point-light displays as to-be-memorized BM and presented the participants colored BM in a change detection task. We found that working memory capacity for BM-color bindings is rather low; only 1 or 2 BM-color bindings could be retained in working memory regardless of the presentation manners (Experiments 1-3). Furthermore, no object-based encoding took place for colored BM stimuli regardless of the processed dimensions (Experiments 4 and 5). Central executive attention contributes to the maintenance of BM-color bindings, yet maintaining BM bindings in working memory did not require more central attention than did maintaining the constituent dimensions in working memory (Experiment 6). Overall, these results suggest that keeping BM bindings in working memory is a fairly resource-demanding process, yet central executive attention does not play a special role in this cross-module binding.
在过去十年中，人们对工作记忆中用于绑定的机制进行了广泛研究，但很少有研究探讨与人类生物运动（BM）相关的绑定。人类生物运动是日常生活中最显著且具有生物学意义的动态信息，并且独立于其他视觉特征（如颜色）进行存储。本研究探讨了工作记忆中与生物运动相关绑定的三个关键问题：（a）工作记忆中可以保留多少个生物运动绑定单元；（b）在生物运动绑定过程中是否会发生基于对象的非自愿绑定；（c）工作记忆中生物运动绑定的维持是否需要除维持组成维度所需注意力之外的额外注意力。我们通过使用点光显示作为待记忆的生物运动，从非生物运动源中分离出人类生物运动的运动信号，并在变化检测任务中向参与者呈现彩色生物运动。我们发现，生物运动 - 颜色绑定的工作记忆容量相当低；无论呈现方式如何（实验1 - 3），工作记忆中只能保留1或2个生物运动 - 颜色绑定。此外，无论处理的维度如何，彩色生物运动刺激都不会发生基于对象的编码（实验4和5）。中央执行注意力有助于生物运动 - 颜色绑定的维持，但在工作记忆中维持生物运动绑定并不比维持工作记忆中的组成维度需要更多的中央注意力（实验6）。总体而言，这些结果表明，在工作记忆中保持生物运动绑定是一个相当耗费资源的过程，但中央执行注意力在这种跨模块绑定中并不起特殊作用。
