Department of Psychology, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2019 Oct;26(5):1657-1665. doi: 10.3758/s13423-019-01640-7.
Most studies on visual working memory (VWM) and spatial working memory (SWM) have employed visual stimuli presented at the fronto-parallel plane and few have involved depth perception. VWM is often considered as a memory buffer for temporarily holding and manipulating visual information that relates to visual features of an object, and SWM for holding and manipulating spatial information that concerns the spatial location of an object. Although previous research has investigated the effect of stereoscopic depth on VWM, the question of how depth positions are stored in working memory has not been systematically investigated, leaving gaps in the existing literature on working memory. Here, we explore working memory for depth by using a change detection task. The memory items were presented at various stereoscopic depth planes perpendicular to the line of sight, with one item per depth plane. Participants were asked to make judgments on whether the depth position of the target (one of the memory items) had changed. The results showed a conservative response bias that observers tended to make 'no change' responses when detecting changes in depth. In addition, we found that similar to VWM, the change detection accuracy degraded with the number of memory items presented, but the accuracy was much lower than that reported for VWM, suggesting that the storage for depth information is severely limited and less precise than that for visual information. The detection sensitivity was higher for the nearest and farthest depths and was better when the probe was presented along with the other items originally in the memory array, indicating that how well the to-be-stored depth can be stored in working memory depends on its relation with the other depth positions.
大多数关于视觉工作记忆 (VWM) 和空间工作记忆 (SWM) 的研究都采用了在额状面呈现的视觉刺激，很少涉及深度感知。VWM 通常被认为是一个用于临时存储和操作与物体视觉特征相关的视觉信息的记忆缓冲区，而 SWM 则用于存储和操作与物体空间位置相关的空间信息。尽管之前的研究已经调查了立体深度对 VWM 的影响，但关于深度位置如何在工作记忆中存储的问题尚未得到系统研究，这使得工作记忆的现有文献存在空白。在这里，我们通过使用变化检测任务来探索深度工作记忆。记忆项目以垂直于视线的各种立体深度平面呈现，每个深度平面一个项目。要求参与者判断目标（记忆项目之一）的深度位置是否发生了变化。结果显示出保守的反应偏差，观察者在检测深度变化时往往会做出“无变化”的反应。此外，我们发现，与 VWM 类似，变化检测准确性随着呈现的记忆项目数量的增加而下降，但准确性远低于 VWM 报告的准确性，这表明深度信息的存储受到严重限制，并且不如视觉信息精确。最近和最远的深度的检测灵敏度更高，当探针与记忆数组中原本的其他项目一起呈现时，检测灵敏度更好，这表明要存储的深度在工作记忆中存储的好坏程度取决于其与其他深度位置的关系。
