Timm J David, Papenmeier Frank
Department of Psychology, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2020 Dec;73(12):2246-2259. doi: 10.1177/1747021820951130. Epub 2020 Sep 20.
People maintain object locations not as independent absolute positions but based on inter-object relations in the form of a spatial configuration in visual working memory (VWM). Initial evidence suggests that spatial configurations can be reorganised during maintenance; however, this mechanism is not well understood. We report three experiments investigating this reorganisation process. First, we found that directing spatial attention with a retro cue triggers a reorganisation of spatial configurations during maintenance (Experiment 1). Second, we investigated the role of contextual objects rendered either relevant or irrelevant through the retro cue by manipulating the locations of the context at retrieval both within a partial display (Experiment 2a) and a whole display (Experiment 2b). Whereas the similar impairment of memory performance by changing the relevant and global context suggests a complete reorganisation of spatial configurations in VWM, this interpretation was challenged by the observation of impaired memory performance with changes of the irrelevant objects in a whole display that retains the relevant locations. Thus, we suggest that reorganisation should be considered to be the formation of a partial configuration based on the objects rendered relevant by the retro cue in addition to the originally encoded global configuration, with both configurations affecting memory performance.
人们并非将物体位置维持为独立的绝对位置，而是基于视觉工作记忆（VWM）中以空间构型形式存在的物体间关系来维持。初步证据表明，空间构型在维持过程中可以被重新组织；然而，这种机制尚未得到很好的理解。我们报告了三项研究这一重新组织过程的实验。首先，我们发现用回溯线索引导空间注意会在维持过程中触发空间构型的重新组织（实验1）。其次，我们通过在部分显示（实验2a）和整体显示（实验2b）中检索时操纵背景的位置，研究了通过回溯线索使背景物体变得相关或不相关的作用。虽然改变相关和全局背景对记忆表现有类似的损害表明VWM中空间构型进行了完全的重新组织，但这种解释受到了以下观察结果的挑战：在保留相关位置的整体显示中，改变不相关物体也会损害记忆表现。因此，我们建议重新组织应被视为除了最初编码的全局构型之外，基于回溯线索使相关的物体形成部分构型，且这两种构型都会影响记忆表现。
