1 Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University.
2 Department of Psychology, Florida Atlantic University.
Psychol Sci. 2017 Dec;28(12):1773-1785. doi: 10.1177/0956797617719949. Epub 2017 Sep 28.
A prevalent view of visual working memory (VWM) is that visual information is actively maintained in the form of perceptually integrated objects. Such reliance on object-based representations would predict that after an object is fully encoded into VWM, all features of that object would need to be maintained as a coherent unit. Here, we evaluated this idea by testing whether memory resources can be redeployed to a specific feature of an object already stored in VWM. We found that observers can utilize a retrospective cue presented during the maintenance period to attenuate both the gradual deterioration and complete loss of memory for a cued feature over time, but at the cost of accelerated loss of information regarding the uncued feature. Our findings demonstrate that object representations held within VWM can be decomposed into individual features and that having to retain additional features imposes greater demands on active maintenance processes.
一种流行的视觉工作记忆 (VWM) 观点认为，视觉信息以感知上整合的对象的形式被主动保持。这种对基于对象的表示的依赖将预测，在一个对象被完全编码到 VWM 之后，该对象的所有特征都需要作为一个连贯的单元来保持。在这里，我们通过测试记忆资源是否可以重新分配到已经存储在 VWM 中的对象的特定特征来评估这个想法。我们发现，观察者可以利用在保持期呈现的回溯线索来减轻随着时间的推移，对提示特征的逐渐恶化和完全丧失记忆的影响，但代价是加速对未提示特征的信息的丧失。我们的发现表明，VWM 中持有的对象表示可以分解为单个特征，并且必须保留额外的特征会对主动维护过程提出更高的要求。
