Department of Psychology.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2021 Jun;47(6):852-868. doi: 10.1037/xhp0000921.
The mixed-category advantage in visual working memory refers to improved memory for an image in a display containing two different categories relative to a display containing only one category (Cohen et al., 2014). Jiang, Remington, et al. (2016) found that this advantage characterizes mainly faces and suggested that face-only displays suffer from enhanced interference due to the unique configural nature of faces. Faces, however, possess social and emotional significance that may bias attention toward them in mixed-category displays at the expense of their counterpart category. Consequently, the counterpart category may suffer from little/no advantage or even an inversed effect. Using a change-detection task, we showed that a category that demonstrated a mixed-category disadvantage when paired with faces demonstrated a mixed-category advantage when paired with other nonfacial categories. Furthermore, manipulating the likelihood of testing a specific category (i.e., changing its task relevance) in mixed-category trials altered its advantaged/disadvantaged status, suggesting that the effect may be mediated by attention. Finally, to control for perceptual exposure factors, a sequential presentation experimental version was conducted. Whereas faces showed a typical mixed-category advantage, this pattern was again modulated (yielding an advantage for a nonfacial category) when inserting a task-relevance manipulation. Taken together, our findings support a central resource allocation account, according to which the asymmetric mixed-category effect likely stems from an attentional bias to one of the two categories. This attentional bias is not necessarily spatial in its nature, and it presumably affects processing stages subsequent to the initial perceptual encoding phase in working memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
混合类别优势在视觉工作记忆中是指在包含两个不同类别的显示中，相对于仅包含一个类别的显示，对一个图像的记忆得到改善（Cohen 等人，2014）。Jiang、Remington 等人（2016）发现，这种优势主要体现在面孔上，并认为仅包含面孔的显示由于面孔的独特组态性质而受到增强的干扰。然而，面孔具有社会和情感意义，这可能会使注意力偏向于混合类别显示中的面孔，而牺牲其对应类别。因此，对应类别可能会受到很小/没有优势，甚至是相反的影响。使用变化检测任务，我们表明，与面孔配对时表现出混合类别劣势的类别，与其他非面部类别配对时表现出混合类别优势。此外，在混合类别试验中操纵特定类别（即改变其任务相关性）的测试可能性会改变其有利/不利的状态，这表明这种影响可能是由注意力介导的。最后，为了控制感知暴露因素，进行了顺序呈现实验版本。虽然面孔显示出典型的混合类别优势，但当插入任务相关性操作时，这种模式再次被调节（导致非面部类别具有优势）。总之，我们的研究结果支持一种中央资源分配理论，根据该理论，不对称的混合类别效应可能源于对两个类别之一的注意力偏向。这种注意力偏向不一定是空间性质的，它可能会影响工作记忆中初始感知编码阶段之后的处理阶段。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2021 APA，保留所有权利）。
