a Department of Psychology , Shandong Normal University , Jinan , People's Republic of China.
b Department of Psychology, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Social Cognitive Neuroscience and Mental Health, & Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Brain Function and Disease , Sun Yat-Sen University , Guangzhou , People's Republic of China.
Memory. 2019 Jul;27(6):729-738. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2018.1561894. Epub 2018 Dec 24.
Whether more attention is required for maintaining bindings than maintaining features in visual working memory (VWM) remains an open question. If maintaining bindings in VWM does not require more attention than maintaining features, is it related to the stability of binding representations? In this study, we explored whether maintaining bindings requires more attention than maintaining features for similar and dissimilar objects by inserting a feature report task into the maintenance phase of VWM in Experiments 1 and 2. We also investigated whether the effect of similarity on the attentional requirement for maintaining bindings and features is due to the stability of VWM representations by inserting a suffix during the maintenance phase of VWM in Experiment 3. The results showed that when object-based attention was consumed, bindings were more impaired than features for dissimilar objects but not for similar objects. We also found that the bindings of similar objects were less interfered by the suffix than those of dissimilar objects. Our findings suggest that maintaining bindings does not require more attention than maintaining features when the binding representations are stable in VWM and similarity improves the stability of binding representations.
在视觉工作记忆（VWM）中，维持绑定是否比维持特征需要更多的注意力，这仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。如果维持 VWM 中的绑定不需要比维持特征更多的注意力，那么这与绑定表示的稳定性有关吗？在这项研究中，我们通过在实验 1 和实验 2 的 VWM 维持阶段插入一个特征报告任务，来探索维持绑定是否比维持相似和不同物体的特征需要更多的注意力。我们还通过在 VWM 的维持阶段插入一个后缀，在实验 3 中研究了相似性对维持绑定和特征注意力需求的影响是否是由于 VWM 表示的稳定性造成的。结果表明，当基于对象的注意力被消耗时，对于不同的物体，绑定比特征受到的损害更大，但对于相似的物体则不是这样。我们还发现，相似物体的绑定受后缀的干扰比不同物体的绑定要小。我们的发现表明，当 VWM 中的绑定表示稳定且相似性提高了绑定表示的稳定性时，维持绑定不需要比维持特征更多的注意力。
