Antonelli Karla B, Williams Carrick C
Department of Psychology, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS, 39762, USA.
NRTC on Blindness and Low Vision, PO Box 6189, Mississippi State, MS, 39762, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2017 Nov;45(8):1295-1305. doi: 10.3758/s13421-017-0728-x.
Although Konkle, Brady, Alvarez, and Oliva (2010, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 139(3), 558) claim that visual long-term memory (VLTM) is organized on underlying conceptual, not perceptual, information, visual memory results from visual search tasks are not well explained by this theory. We hypothesized that when viewing an object, any task-relevant visual information is critical to the organizational structure of VLTM. In two experiments, we examined the organization of VLTM by measuring the amount of retroactive interference created by objects possessing different combinations of task-relevant features. Based on task instructions, only the conceptual category was task relevant or both the conceptual category and a perceptual object feature were task relevant. Findings indicated that when made task relevant, perceptual object feature information, along with conceptual category information, could affect memory organization for objects in VLTM. However, when perceptual object feature information was task irrelevant, it did not contribute to memory organization; instead, memory defaulted to being organized around conceptual category information. These findings support the theory that a task-defined organizational structure is created in VLTM based on the relevance of particular object features and information.
尽管康克尔、布雷迪、阿尔瓦雷斯和奥利瓦(2010年,《实验心理学杂志:总论》,第139卷第3期,第558页)声称视觉长期记忆(VLTM)是基于潜在的概念性而非感知性信息进行组织的,但视觉搜索任务产生的视觉记忆结果并不能很好地用该理论来解释。我们假设,当观察一个物体时,任何与任务相关的视觉信息对VLTM的组织结构都至关重要。在两项实验中,我们通过测量具有不同任务相关特征组合的物体所产生的倒摄干扰量,来研究VLTM的组织情况。根据任务指令,只有概念类别与任务相关,或者概念类别和一个感知物体特征都与任务相关。研究结果表明,当感知物体特征信息与任务相关时,它与概念类别信息一起,会影响VLTM中物体的记忆组织。然而,当感知物体特征信息与任务不相关时,它对记忆组织没有贡献;相反,记忆默认围绕概念类别信息进行组织。这些发现支持了这样一种理论,即基于特定物体特征和信息的相关性,在VLTM中创建了一个任务定义的组织结构。