Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, National Demonstration Center for Experimental Psychology Education (Beijing Normal University), Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China.
State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning and IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
Mem Cognit. 2020 Jan;48(1):32-41. doi: 10.3758/s13421-019-00959-9.
The categorical perception (CP) of color describes the phenomenon that colors across categories (e.g., blue and green) are more discriminable than within-category colors (e.g., green) even when the perceptual distance is controlled. While most studies are conducted in a static visual scene, the current study investigated the effect of color categories when tracking multiple colored objects within two experiments. The targets or distractors were either from the same color category or from two different categories, and the perceptual distance was controlled across all conditions. We found that location tracking was facilitated when the targets or the distractors shared the same color category in the tracking task, which required location tracking and color memorization at the same time, compared with when they were from two different categories (Experiment 1). By contrast, when location tracking was the sole demand and no explicit color processing was required, the target CP effects, but not the distractor CP effects, persisted (Experiment 2). We conclude that color categories can dynamically modulate preattention visual processing when color working memory is involved, but that attention is necessary to produce CP effects when color is irrelevant to the task.
颜色范畴知觉（CP）描述了一种现象，即当控制感知距离时，跨范畴的颜色（如蓝色和绿色）比范畴内的颜色（如绿色）更具有可辨别性。尽管大多数研究都是在静态视觉场景中进行的，但本研究在两个实验中调查了颜色范畴在跟踪多个彩色物体时的影响。目标或干扰项要么来自同一颜色范畴，要么来自两个不同的范畴，并且在所有条件下都控制了感知距离。我们发现，在跟踪任务中，当目标或干扰项具有相同的颜色范畴时，位置跟踪会得到促进，这需要同时进行位置跟踪和颜色记忆，而当它们来自两个不同的范畴时（实验 1），情况则并非如此。相比之下，当位置跟踪是唯一的要求且不需要明确的颜色处理时，仅保留了目标 CP 效应，而没有保留干扰 CP 效应（实验 2）。我们的结论是，当涉及颜色工作记忆时，颜色范畴可以动态调节预注意视觉处理，但当颜色与任务无关时，注意力是产生 CP 效应所必需的。
