Department of Psychology, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China.
J Vis. 2021 Jul 6;21(7):8. doi: 10.1167/jov.21.7.8.
For decades, working memory (WM) has been a heated research topic in the field of cognitive psychology. However, most studies on WM presented visual stimuli on a two-dimensional plane, rarely involving depth perception. Several previous studies have investigated how depth information is stored in WM, and found that WM for depth is even more limited in capacity and the memory performance is poor compared to visual WM. In the present study, we used a change detection task to investigate whether dissociating memory items by different visual features, thereby to increase their perceptual separateness, can improve WM performance for depth. Memory items presented at various depth planes were bound with different colors (Experiments 1 and 3) or sizes (Experiment 2). The memory performance for depth locations of visual stimuli with homogeneous and heterogeneous appearances were tested and compared. The results showed a consistent pattern that although separating items with various feature values did not affect the overall memory performance, the manipulation significantly improved memory performance for the middle depth locations but impaired the performance for the boundary locations when observers fixated at the center of the whole depth volume. The memory benefits of feature separation can be attributed to enhanced individuation of memory items, therefore facilitating a more balanced allocation of attention and memory resources.
几十年来，工作记忆 (WM) 一直是认知心理学领域的热门研究课题。然而，大多数关于 WM 的研究都在二维平面上呈现视觉刺激，很少涉及深度感知。先前的几项研究调查了深度信息如何在 WM 中存储，结果发现与视觉 WM 相比，深度 WM 的容量更有限，记忆性能更差。在本研究中，我们使用变化检测任务来研究通过不同的视觉特征来分离记忆项目，从而提高它们的感知分离度，是否可以提高深度的 WM 性能。在不同的深度平面上呈现的记忆项目与不同的颜色（实验 1 和 3）或大小（实验 2）绑定。测试并比较了具有同质性和异质性外观的视觉刺激的深度位置的记忆性能。结果显示出一致的模式，尽管使用各种特征值分离项目不会影响整体记忆性能，但当观察者注视整个深度区域的中心时，这种操作显著提高了中间深度位置的记忆性能，而损害了边界位置的记忆性能。特征分离的记忆益处可以归因于记忆项目的个体化增强，从而更平衡地分配注意力和记忆资源。
