Sahan Muhammet Ikbal, van Dijck Jean-Philippe, Fias Wim
Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, H. Dunantlaan 2, 9000, Ghent, Belgium.
Department of Applied Psychology, Thomas More University College, B-2018, Antwerp, Belgium.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2022 Apr;29(2):530-540. doi: 10.3758/s13423-021-02005-9. Epub 2021 Sep 28.
The problem of how the mind can retain sequentially organized information has a long research tradition that remains unresolved. While various computational models propose a mechanism of binding serial order information to position markers, the representational nature and processes that operate on these position markers are not clear. Recent behavioral work suggests that space is used to mark positions in serial order and that this process is governed by spatial attention. Based on the assumption that brain areas controlling spatial attention are also involved in saccadic planning, we continuously tracked the eye-movements as a direct measure of the spatial attention during retrieval from a verbal WM sequence. Participants memorized a sequence of auditory numbers. During retention, they heard a number-cue that did or did not belong to the memorized set. After this number-cue, a target-beep could be presented to which they had to respond if the number-cue belonged to the memorized sequence. In Experiment 1, the target-beep was either presented to the left or right ear, and in Experiment 2 bilaterally (removing any spatial aspect). We tested the hypothesis that systematic eye-movements are made when people retrieve items of sequences of auditory words and found that the retrieval of begin items resulted in leftward eye-movements and the retrieval of end items in rightward eye-movements. These observations indicate that the oculomotor system is also involved in the serial order processes in verbal WM thereby providing a promising novel approach to get insight into abstract cognitive processes.
思维如何保留按顺序组织的信息这一问题有着悠久的研究传统，但至今仍未得到解决。虽然各种计算模型提出了将序列顺序信息与位置标记绑定的机制，但这些位置标记的表征性质和对其进行操作的过程尚不清楚。最近的行为学研究表明，空间被用于标记序列顺序中的位置，并且这一过程受空间注意力的控制。基于控制空间注意力的脑区也参与扫视计划的假设，我们在从言语工作记忆序列中检索信息时持续跟踪眼动，以此作为空间注意力的直接测量指标。参与者记住一系列听觉数字。在记忆保持阶段，他们会听到一个数字提示，该提示属于或不属于记忆组。在这个数字提示之后，会出现一个目标提示音，如果数字提示属于记忆序列，他们必须对其做出反应。在实验1中，目标提示音要么出现在左耳，要么出现在右耳，在实验2中则是双侧出现（消除任何空间因素）。我们测试了这样一个假设：当人们检索听觉单词序列中的项目时会进行系统性眼动，并且发现检索起始项目会导致向左的眼动，检索末尾项目会导致向右的眼动。这些观察结果表明，动眼系统也参与了言语工作记忆中的序列顺序过程，从而为深入了解抽象认知过程提供了一种有前景的新方法。
