Vanderbilt University, Vanderbilt Vision Research Center, Nashville, TN, USA.
Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, PMB 407817, 2301 Vanderbilt Place, Nashville, TN, 37240-7817, USA.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2021 May;83(4):1391-1396. doi: 10.3758/s13414-021-02263-8. Epub 2021 Mar 16.
Contrary to early proposals stating that we always store bound object features in visual working memory, more recent work has suggested that we can inhibit the encoding, or consolidation, of irrelevant features of objects into visual working memory. However, a number of theoretical proposals suggest that spatial location is a special feature of an object that might be obligatorily bound to objects stored in visual working memory. In this study, I used a masking paradigm to measure the efficiency of encoding into visual working memory while subjects were tasked with remembering the location, color, or both of these features of the objects. The measures of consolidation efficiency indicate that spatial location is not encoded into visual working memory unless it is relevant for the task at hand. Thus, the present experiments show that we can control which features of an object are selectively stored in working memory, including spatial location, a feature thought to be immune to such filtering.
与早期提出的我们总是将绑定的对象特征存储在视觉工作记忆中的观点相反，最近的研究表明，我们可以抑制将对象的不相关特征编码或巩固到视觉工作记忆中。然而，许多理论观点表明，空间位置是对象的一个特殊特征，可能必须与存储在视觉工作记忆中的对象绑定。在这项研究中，我使用掩蔽范式来衡量在被试记住对象的位置、颜色或这两个特征的同时，将其编码到视觉工作记忆中的效率。巩固效率的衡量指标表明，除非空间位置与当前任务相关，否则它不会被编码到视觉工作记忆中。因此，本实验表明，我们可以控制对象的哪些特征被选择性地存储在工作记忆中，包括空间位置，这一特征被认为是不受这种过滤影响的。
