School of Psychology, Cardiff University, UK.
Br J Psychol. 2019 May;110(2):306-327. doi: 10.1111/bjop.12355. Epub 2018 Oct 21.
Consistent, robust boosts to visual working memory capacity are observed when colour-location arrays contain duplicate colours. The prevailing explanation suggests that duplicated colours are encoded as one perceptual group. If so, then we should observe not only higher working memory capacity overall for displays containing duplicates, but specifically an improved ability to remember unique colours from displays including duplicates compared with displays comprising all uniquely coloured items. Furthermore, less effort should be required to retain displays as colour redundancy increases. I recorded gaze position and pupil sizes during a visual change detection task including displays of 4-6 items with either all unique colours, two items with a common colour, or three items with a common colour in samples of young and healthy elderly adults. Increased redundancy was indeed associated with higher estimated working memory capacity, both for tests of duplicates and uniquely coloured items. Redundancy was also associated with decreased pupil size during retention, especially in young adults. While elderly adults also benefited from colour redundancy, spillover to unique items was less obvious with low redundancy than in young adults. This experiment confirms previous findings and presents complementary novel evidence linking perceptual grouping via colour redundancy with decreased mental effort.
当颜色-位置数组包含重复颜色时，观察到视觉工作记忆容量的一致、稳健的提升。主流解释表明，重复的颜色被编码为一个知觉组。如果是这样，那么我们不仅应该观察到包含重复项的显示总体上具有更高的工作记忆容量，而且还应该观察到与仅包含独特颜色项的显示相比，从包括重复项的显示中记住独特颜色的能力得到了改善。此外，随着颜色冗余度的增加，保留显示所需的努力应该减少。我在一项视觉变化检测任务中记录了注视位置和瞳孔大小，该任务包括显示 4-6 个项目，这些项目要么具有所有独特的颜色，要么具有两个具有共同颜色的项目，要么具有三个具有共同颜色的项目，这些项目样本来自年轻和健康的老年人。增加冗余度确实与更高的估计工作记忆容量相关，无论是在测试重复项还是独特颜色项时。冗余度也与保留期间的瞳孔大小减小有关，尤其是在年轻成年人中。虽然老年人也受益于颜色冗余，但与年轻人相比，低冗余度下对独特项目的溢出不那么明显。这项实验证实了先前的发现，并提供了补充的新证据，将通过颜色冗余进行的知觉分组与减少心理努力联系起来。
