Li Chia-Ling, Aivar M Pilar, Kit Dmitry M, Tong Matthew H, Hayhoe Mary M
J Vis. 2016 Jun 1;16(8):9. doi: 10.1167/16.8.9.
The role of memory in guiding attention allocation in daily behaviors is not well understood. In experiments with two-dimensional (2D) images, there is mixed evidence about the importance of memory. Because the stimulus context in laboratory experiments and daily behaviors differs extensively, we investigated the role of memory in visual search, in both two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) environments. A 3D immersive virtual apartment composed of two rooms was created, and a parallel 2D visual search experiment composed of snapshots from the 3D environment was developed. Eye movements were tracked in both experiments. Repeated searches for geometric objects were performed to assess the role of spatial memory. Subsequently, subjects searched for realistic context objects to test for incidental learning. Our results show that subjects learned the room-target associations in 3D but less so in 2D. Gaze was increasingly restricted to relevant regions of the room with experience in both settings. Search for local contextual objects, however, was not facilitated by early experience. Incidental fixations to context objects do not necessarily benefit search performance. Together, these results demonstrate that memory for global aspects of the environment guides search by restricting allocation of attention to likely regions, whereas task relevance determines what is learned from the active search experience. Behaviors in 2D and 3D environments are comparable, although there is greater use of memory in 3D.
记忆在指导日常行为中的注意力分配方面所起的作用尚未得到充分理解。在二维（2D）图像实验中，关于记忆的重要性存在混杂的证据。由于实验室实验和日常行为中的刺激情境有很大差异，我们研究了记忆在二维（2D）和三维（3D）环境中的视觉搜索中的作用。创建了一个由两个房间组成的3D沉浸式虚拟公寓，并开发了一个由3D环境快照组成的平行二维视觉搜索实验。在两个实验中都跟踪了眼球运动。进行了对几何物体的重复搜索以评估空间记忆的作用。随后，受试者搜索现实情境物体以测试附带学习。我们的结果表明，受试者在3D环境中学习了房间与目标的关联，但在2D环境中学习得较少。在两种环境中，随着经验的增加，注视越来越多地局限于房间的相关区域。然而，早期经验并未促进对局部情境物体的搜索。对情境物体的附带注视不一定有利于搜索性能。总之，这些结果表明，对环境全局方面的记忆通过将注意力分配限制在可能的区域来指导搜索，而任务相关性决定了从主动搜索经验中学到什么。二维和三维环境中的行为具有可比性，尽管三维环境中对记忆的利用更多。
