University of Montreal, Department of Psychology, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
University of Montreal, School of Optometry, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
J Vis. 2021 Aug 2;21(8):8. doi: 10.1167/jov.21.8.8.
Trans-saccadic memory consists of keeping track of objects' locations and features across saccades; pre-saccadic information is remembered and compared with post-saccadic information. It has been shown to have limited resources and involve attention with respect to the selection of objects and features. In support, a previous study showed that recognition of distinct post-saccadic objects in the visual scene is impaired when pre-saccadic objects are relevant and thus already encoded in memory (Poth, Herwig, Schneider, 2015). Here, we investigated the inverse (i.e. how the memory of pre-saccadic objects is affected by abrupt but irrelevant changes in the post-saccadic visual scene). We also modulated the amount of attention to the relevant pre-saccadic object by having participants either make a saccade to it or elsewhere and observed that pre-saccadic attentional facilitation affected how much post-saccadic changes disrupted trans-saccadic memory of pre-saccadic objects. Participants identified a flashed symbol (d, b, p, or q, among distracters), at one of six placeholders (figures "8") arranged in circle around fixation while planning a saccade to one of them. They reported the identity of the symbol after the saccade. We changed the post-saccadic scene in Experiment one by removing the entire scene, only the placeholder where the pre-saccadic symbol was presented, or all other placeholders except this one. We observed reduced identification performance when only the saccade-target placeholder disappeared after the saccade. In Experiment two, we changed one placeholder location (inward/outward shift or rotation re. saccade vector) after the saccade and observed that identification performance decreased with increased shift/rotation of the saccade-target placeholder. We conclude that pre-saccadic memory is disrupted by abrupt attention-capturing post-saccadic changes of visual scene, particularly when these changes involve the object prioritized by being the goal of a saccade. These findings support the notion that limited trans-saccadic memory resources are disrupted when object correspondence at saccadic goal is broken through removal or location change.
眼跳后的记忆包括在眼跳中跟踪物体的位置和特征；在眼跳之前的信息被记住，并与眼跳后的信息进行比较。已经表明，它的资源有限，并且涉及到对象和特征的选择的注意力。支持这一观点的是，先前的一项研究表明，当眼跳前的物体与记忆中的物体相关并因此已经被编码时，视觉场景中不同的眼跳后物体的识别会受到损害（Poth、Herwig、Schneider，2015）。在这里，我们研究了相反的情况（即眼跳前物体的记忆如何受到眼跳后视觉场景中突然但不相关的变化的影响）。我们还通过让参与者要么对它进行眼跳，要么对其他地方进行眼跳，来调节对相关眼跳前物体的注意力的多少，并观察到眼跳前注意力的促进作用会影响眼跳后变化对眼跳前物体的记忆的破坏程度。参与者在一个固定的点周围的六个占位符（“8”字形）中的一个位置识别一个闪烁的符号（d、b、p 或 q，在干扰物中），同时计划对其中一个进行眼跳。他们在眼跳后报告符号的身份。在实验一中，我们通过移除整个场景、仅移除眼跳前符号呈现的占位符或除了这个占位符之外的所有其他占位符来改变眼跳后的场景。我们观察到，当眼跳后只有眼跳目标占位符消失时，识别性能会降低。在实验二中，我们在眼跳后改变了一个占位符的位置（相对于眼跳向量的内移/外移或旋转），并观察到当眼跳目标占位符的移位/旋转增加时，识别性能会降低。我们的结论是，眼跳后的视觉场景的突然注意捕捉变化会破坏眼跳前的记忆，特别是当这些变化涉及到作为眼跳目标的物体时。这些发现支持了这样一种观点，即当眼跳目标的物体对应关系被破坏时，例如通过移除或位置改变，有限的眼跳间记忆资源会受到干扰。
