Nussenbaum Kate, Amso Dima, Markant Julie
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford, UK, OX1 3PH.
Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2017 Nov;79(8):2606-2619. doi: 10.3758/s13414-017-1399-1.
Previous work has demonstrated that increasing the number of distractors in a search array can reduce interference from distractor content during target processing. However, it is unclear how this reduced interference influences learning of target information. Here, we investigated how varying the amount and content of distraction present in a learning environment affects visual search and subsequent memory for target items. In two experiments, we demonstrate that the number and content of competing distractors interact in their influence on target selection and memory. Specifically, while increasing the number of distractors present in a search array made target detection more effortful, it did not impair learning and memory for target content. Instead, when the distractors contained category information that conflicted with the target, increasing the number of distractors from one to three actually benefitted learning and memory. These data suggest that increasing numbers of distractors may reduce interference from conflicting conceptual information during encoding.
先前的研究表明，增加搜索阵列中干扰项的数量可以减少目标处理过程中干扰项内容的干扰。然而，尚不清楚这种减少的干扰如何影响目标信息的学习。在这里，我们研究了学习环境中干扰的数量和内容的变化如何影响对目标项目的视觉搜索和后续记忆。在两个实验中，我们证明了竞争性干扰项的数量和内容在对目标选择和记忆的影响上存在相互作用。具体而言，虽然增加搜索阵列中干扰项的数量会使目标检测更加费力，但它不会损害对目标内容的学习和记忆。相反，当干扰项包含与目标冲突的类别信息时，将干扰项的数量从一个增加到三个实际上有利于学习和记忆。这些数据表明，增加干扰项的数量可能会减少编码过程中来自冲突概念信息的干扰。
