Wen Wen, Hou Yin, Li Sheng
School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, 5 Yiheyuan Road, Haidian, Beijing, 100871, China.
Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2018 Jul;80(5):1157-1168. doi: 10.3758/s13414-018-1511-1.
Information stored in the memory systems can affect visual search. Previous studies have shown that holding the to-be-ignored features of distractors in working memory (WM) could accelerate target selection. However, such facilitation effect was only observed when the cued to-be-ignored features remained unchanged within an experimental block (i.e., the fixed cue condition). No search benefit was obtained if the to-be-ignored features varied from trial to trial (i.e., the varied cue condition). In the present study, we conducted three behavioral experiments to investigate whether the WM and long-term memory (LTM) representations of the to-be-ignored features could facilitate visual search in the fixed cue (Experiment 1) and varied cue (Experiments 2 and 3) conditions. Given the importance of the processing time of cognitive control in distractor suppression, we divided visual search trials into five quintiles based on their reaction times (RTs) and examined the temporal characteristics of the suppression effect. Results showed that both the WM and LTM representations of the to-be-ignored features could facilitate distractor suppression in the fixed cue condition, and the facilitation effects were evident across the quintiles in the RT distribution. However, in the varied cue condition, the RT benefits of the WM-matched distractors occurred only in the trials with the longest RTs, whereas no advantage of the LTM-matched distractors was observed. These results suggest that the effective WM-guided distractor suppression depends on the availability of cognitive control and the LTM-guided suppression occurs only if sufficient WM resource is accessible by LTM reactivation.
存储在记忆系统中的信息会影响视觉搜索。先前的研究表明，在工作记忆（WM）中保留干扰项的待忽略特征可以加速目标选择。然而，这种促进作用仅在实验块内提示的待忽略特征保持不变时（即固定提示条件）才被观察到。如果待忽略特征在试验之间变化（即变化提示条件），则无法获得搜索优势。在本研究中，我们进行了三项行为实验，以调查待忽略特征的工作记忆和长期记忆（LTM）表征是否能在固定提示（实验1）和变化提示（实验2和3）条件下促进视觉搜索。鉴于认知控制处理时间在干扰项抑制中的重要性，我们根据反应时间（RTs）将视觉搜索试验分为五个五分位数，并检查了抑制效应的时间特征。结果表明，待忽略特征的工作记忆和长期记忆表征都可以在固定提示条件下促进干扰项抑制，并且在RT分布的五分位数中促进作用都很明显。然而，在变化提示条件下，与工作记忆匹配的干扰项的RT优势仅出现在RT最长的试验中，而未观察到与长期记忆匹配的干扰项有任何优势。这些结果表明，有效的工作记忆引导的干扰项抑制取决于认知控制的可用性，并且只有当长期记忆重新激活可获得足够的工作记忆资源时，长期记忆引导的抑制才会发生。
