Department of Psychology, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA.
Nat Hum Behav. 2020 Nov;4(11):1156-1172. doi: 10.1038/s41562-020-00938-0. Epub 2020 Sep 7.
Almost all models of visual memory implicitly assume that errors in mnemonic representations are linearly related to distance in stimulus space. Here we show that neither memory nor perception are appropriately scaled in stimulus space; instead, they are based on a transformed similarity representation that is nonlinearly related to stimulus space. This result calls into question a foundational assumption of extant models of visual working memory. Once psychophysical similarity is taken into account, aspects of memory that have been thought to demonstrate a fixed working memory capacity of around three or four items and to require fundamentally different representations-across different stimuli, tasks and types of memory-can be parsimoniously explained with a unitary signal detection framework. These results have substantial implications for the study of visual memory and lead to a substantial reinterpretation of the relationship between perception, working memory and long-term memory.
几乎所有的视觉记忆模型都隐含地假设，记忆表象中的错误与刺激空间中的距离呈线性关系。在这里，我们表明，记忆和感知都没有在刺激空间中得到适当的缩放；相反，它们基于一种转换后的相似性表示，这种表示与刺激空间是非线性相关的。这一结果对现有的视觉工作记忆模型的一个基本假设提出了质疑。一旦考虑到心理物理相似性，那些被认为表现出大约三到四个项目的固定工作记忆容量的记忆方面，以及需要在不同的刺激、任务和记忆类型之间使用根本不同的表示的方面，可以用一个单一的信号检测框架来简洁地解释。这些结果对视觉记忆的研究具有重要意义，并导致对感知、工作记忆和长期记忆之间关系的实质性重新解释。
