Department of Psychology.
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2022 Jul;48(7):942-958. doi: 10.1037/xlm0001014. Epub 2021 Mar 25.
Visual working memory is a capacity-limited cognitive system used to actively store and manipulate visual information. Visual working memory capacity is not fixed, but varies by stimulus type: Stimuli that are more meaningful are better remembered. In the current work, we investigate what conditions lead to the strongest benefits for meaningful stimuli. We propose that in some situations participants may try to encode the entire display holistically (i.e., in a quick "snapshot"). This may lead them to treat objects as simply meaningless, colored "blobs", rather than individually and in a high-level way, which could reduce benefits of meaningful stimuli. In a series of experiments, we directly test whether real-world objects, colors, perceptually matched less-meaningful objects, and fully scrambled objects benefit from deeper processing. We systematically vary the presentation format of stimuli at encoding to be either simultaneous-encouraging a parallel, "take-a-quick-snapshot" strategy-or present the stimuli sequentially, promoting a serial, each-item-at-once strategy. We find large advantages for meaningful objects in all conditions, but find that real-world objects-and to a lesser degree lightly scrambled, still meaningful versions of the objects-benefit from the sequential encoding and thus deeper, focused-on-individual-items processing, while colors do not. Our results suggest single-feature objects may be an outlier in their affordance of parallel, quick processing, and that in more realistic memory situations, visual working memory likely relies upon representations resulting from in-depth processing of objects (e.g., in higher-level visual areas) rather than solely being represented in terms of their low-level features. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
视觉工作记忆是一种用于主动存储和操作视觉信息的容量有限的认知系统。视觉工作记忆容量不是固定的，而是因刺激类型而异：更有意义的刺激更容易被记住。在当前的工作中，我们研究了哪些条件会导致有意义的刺激产生最强的效果。我们提出，在某些情况下，参与者可能会试图整体地（即快速“快照”）对整个显示进行编码。这可能导致他们将物体视为简单的无意义、彩色的“斑点”，而不是以个体和高级的方式，这可能会降低有意义刺激的效果。在一系列实验中，我们直接测试真实物体、颜色、知觉匹配的无意义物体和完全打乱的物体是否受益于更深层次的处理。我们系统地改变刺激在编码时的呈现格式，使其同时呈现（鼓励并行、“快速快照”策略）或顺序呈现，促进串行、逐个项目呈现策略。我们发现，在所有条件下，有意义的物体都有很大的优势，但发现真实物体——以及程度较轻的轻度打乱的、仍然有意义的物体版本——受益于顺序编码，从而受益于更深入、专注于单个项目的处理，而颜色则没有。我们的结果表明，单一特征的物体可能在并行快速处理方面是一个例外，并且在更现实的记忆情况下，视觉工作记忆可能依赖于对物体进行深入处理而产生的表示（例如，在更高层次的视觉区域），而不仅仅是基于其低层次特征来表示。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2022 APA，保留所有权利）。
