Wei Liuqing, Zhang Xuemin, Li Zhen, Liu Jingyao
Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, National Demonstration Center for Experimental Psychology Education (Beijing Normal University), Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning and IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2018 Jan;80(1):118-133. doi: 10.3758/s13414-017-1420-8.
In the Multiple Identity Tracking (MIT) task, categorical distinctions between targets and distractors have been found to facilitate tracking (Wei, Zhang, Lyu, & Li in Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 589, 2016). The purpose of this study was to further investigate the reasons for the facilitation effect, through six experiments. The results of Experiments 1-3 excluded the potential explanations of visual distinctiveness, attentional distribution strategy, and a working memory mechanism, respectively. When objects' visual information was preserved and categorical information was removed, the facilitation effect disappeared, suggesting that the visual distinctiveness between targets and distractors was not the main reason for the facilitation effect. Moreover, the facilitation effect was not the result of strategically shifting the attentional distribution, because the targets received more attention than the distractors in all conditions. Additionally, the facilitation effect did not come about because the identities of targets were encoded and stored in visual working memory to assist in the recovery from tracking errors; when working memory was disturbed by the object identities changing during tracking, the facilitation effect still existed. Experiments 4 and 5 showed that observers grouped targets together and segregated them from distractors on the basis of their categorical information. By doing this, observers could largely avoid distractor interference with tracking and improve tracking performance. Finally, Experiment 6 indicated that category-based grouping is not an automatic, but a goal-directed and effortful, strategy. In summary, the present findings show that a semantic category-based target-grouping mechanism exists in the MIT task, which is likely to be the major reason for the tracking facilitation effect.
在多重身份追踪（MIT）任务中，已发现目标与干扰项之间的类别区分有助于追踪（Wei、Zhang、Lyu和Li，发表于《心理学前沿》，2016年第7卷，第589页）。本研究的目的是通过六个实验进一步探究这种促进效应的原因。实验1至3的结果分别排除了视觉独特性、注意力分配策略和工作记忆机制的潜在解释。当物体的视觉信息得以保留而类别信息被去除时，促进效应消失，这表明目标与干扰项之间的视觉独特性并非促进效应的主要原因。此外，促进效应并非策略性地转移注意力分配的结果，因为在所有条件下目标比干扰项受到更多关注。另外，促进效应的产生并非因为目标的身份被编码并存储在视觉工作记忆中以协助从追踪错误中恢复；当工作记忆在追踪过程中因物体身份变化而受到干扰时，促进效应仍然存在。实验4和5表明，观察者根据目标的类别信息将目标归为一组，并将它们与干扰项区分开来。通过这样做，观察者可以在很大程度上避免干扰项对追踪的干扰并提高追踪性能。最后，实验6表明基于类别的分组不是一种自动的，而是一种目标导向且需要努力的策略。总之，目前的研究结果表明，在MIT任务中存在一种基于语义类别的目标分组机制，这很可能是追踪促进效应的主要原因。
