Department of Psychology, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China.
Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Social Cognitive Neuroscience and Mental Health, Guangzhou, China.
Br J Psychol. 2021 Feb;112(1):230-246. doi: 10.1111/bjop.12456. Epub 2020 Jul 4.
Depth perception is essential for effective interaction with the environment. Although the accuracy of depth perception has been studied extensively, it is unclear how accurate the depth information is stored in working memory. In this study, we investigated the accuracy and systematic biases of depth representation by a delayed estimation task. The memory array consisted of items presented at various stereoscopic depth positions, and the participants were instructed to estimate the depth position of one target item after a retention interval. We examined the effect of spatial configuration by comparing the memory performance in the whole-display condition where non-target memory items were present during retrieval with that in the single-display condition where non-target memory items were absent. In the single-display condition, we found an overestimation bias that the depth estimates were farther than the corresponding depth positions defined by disparity, and a contraction bias that the stored depth positions near the observer were overestimated and those far from the observer were underestimated. The magnitude of these biases increased with the number of to-be-stored items. However, in the whole-display condition, the overestimation bias was corrected and the contraction bias did not increase with the number of to-be-stored items. Our findings suggested that the number of to-be-stored items could affect the accuracy of depth working memory, and its effect depended crucially on whether the information of spatial configuration of memory display was available at the retrieval stage.
深度知觉对于与环境进行有效互动至关重要。尽管已经广泛研究了深度知觉的准确性，但对于深度信息在工作记忆中是如何存储的还不清楚。在这项研究中，我们通过延迟估计任务研究了深度表示的准确性和系统偏差。记忆数组由以各种立体深度位置呈现的项目组成，参与者被指示在保留间隔后估计一个目标项目的深度位置。我们通过比较在整个显示条件下（在检索时存在非目标记忆项目）和在单个显示条件下（在检索时不存在非目标记忆项目）的记忆性能来检查空间配置的效果。在单个显示条件下，我们发现了一种高估偏差，即深度估计值比由视差定义的相应深度位置更远，以及一种收缩偏差，即存储的深度位置靠近观察者的被高估，而远离观察者的被低估。这些偏差的大小随着要存储的项目数量的增加而增加。然而，在整个显示条件下，高估偏差得到了纠正，收缩偏差并没有随着要存储的项目数量的增加而增加。我们的研究结果表明，要存储的项目数量可能会影响深度工作记忆的准确性，其影响取决于在检索阶段是否可以获得记忆显示的空间配置信息。
