Heuer Anna, Schubö Anna
Experimental and Biological Psychology, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany.
J Vis. 2018 May 1;18(5):14. doi: 10.1167/18.5.14.
Visual working memory contents can be selectively weighted according to differences in their task-relevance. In the present study, we examined the influence of two more indirect selection biases established by a concurrent task or learned reward associations: action relevance and motivational value. In three experiments, memory performance was assessed with the same color change detection task. Potential action relevance and motivational value were each determined by a specific feature of the memory items (location or shape, respectively) and manipulated orthogonally. Investigated separately (Experiments 1A and 1B), both selection biases modulated visual working memory. In combination (Experiment 2), action relevance and motivational value still each exerted an influence, but not in a fully independent and additive manner. While action relevance impacted performance irrespective of the reward associated with the items, an effect of motivational value was only observed for action-relevant items. These results support the notion that visual working memory is automatically biased as an inherent part of action planning. More generally, these findings highlight the versatile nature of visual working memory: Contents can be flexibly weighted to reflect differences in their importance, taking into account several sources of information.
视觉工作记忆内容可以根据其任务相关性的差异进行选择性加权。在本研究中，我们考察了由一个并发任务或习得的奖励关联所建立的两种更间接的选择偏差的影响：动作相关性和动机价值。在三个实验中，使用相同的颜色变化检测任务评估记忆表现。潜在的动作相关性和动机价值分别由记忆项目的一个特定特征（分别为位置或形状）来确定，并进行正交操纵。分别进行研究（实验1A和1B）时，两种选择偏差都调节了视觉工作记忆。综合起来（实验2），动作相关性和动机价值仍然各自发挥了影响，但并非以完全独立和累加的方式。虽然动作相关性对表现的影响与项目相关的奖励无关，但动机价值的影响仅在与动作相关的项目中观察到。这些结果支持了这样一种观点，即视觉工作记忆作为动作规划的一个固有部分会自动产生偏差。更普遍地说，这些发现突出了视觉工作记忆的多功能性质：考虑到多种信息来源，其内容可以灵活加权以反映它们重要性的差异。
