Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity, Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; Institute for Brain and Behavior Amsterdam, Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Curr Biol. 2021 Jun 21;31(12):R779-R780. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.04.063.
Working memory can maintain multiple sensory representations to serve unfolding sequential behaviour, such as while making tea or planning a route. How the human mind juggles internal representations as they become relevant to guide sequential behaviour remains poorly understood. Specifically, while there is good evidence that we can flexibly switch priorities among representations in working memory, it is unclear how and when dormant memory representations are brought into focus during sequential behaviour. Capitalising on a recently established and temporally precise gaze marker of internal selection, we reveal that the focus in the mind moves to the next-relevant memory representation while behaviour associated with the presently relevant memory representation is still ongoing. Thus, like visual sampling of external objects in the world, internal visual sampling also 'looks ahead' to the next object in memory during sequential behaviour.
工作记忆可以维持多个感官表象，以服务于展开的序列行为，例如泡茶或规划路线。然而，人类思维如何在内部表象变得与指导序列行为相关时进行灵活地转换优先级，这仍然知之甚少。具体来说，虽然有充分的证据表明我们可以在工作记忆中灵活地切换表象的优先级，但目前尚不清楚在序列行为期间，休眠的记忆表象是如何以及何时被聚焦的。利用最近建立的、时间精度高的内部选择注视标记，我们揭示了在行为与当前相关的记忆表象仍在进行的同时，思维的焦点转移到下一个相关的记忆表象。因此，就像对外界物体的视觉采样一样，内部视觉采样在序列行为中也会“超前”采样记忆中的下一个物体。
