Sun Yat-Sen University, Department of Psychology, Guangzhou, China.
Shaoxing University, Center for Brain, Mind, and Education, Shaoxing, China.
J Vis. 2022 May 3;22(6):4. doi: 10.1167/jov.22.6.4.
The representation of individual planar locations and features stored in working memory can be affected by the average representation. However, less is known about how the average representation affects the short-term storage of depth information. To evaluate the possible different roles of the ensemble average in working memory for planar and depth information, we used mathematical models to fit the data collected from one study on working memory for depth and 12 studies on working memory for planar information. The pattern of recalled depth was well captured by models assuming that there was a probability of reporting the average depth instead of the individual depth, compressing the recalled front-back distance of the stimulus ensemble compared to the perceived distance. However, when modeling the recalled planar information, we found that participants tended to report individual nontarget features when the target was not memorized, and the assumption of reporting average information improves the data fitting only in very few studies. These results provide evidence for our hypothesis that average depth information can be used as a substitution for individual depth information stored in working memory, but for planar visual features, the substitution of target with the average works under a constraint that the average of to-be-remembered features is readily accessible.
个体平面位置和特征的表示形式存储在工作记忆中，可能会受到平均表示形式的影响。然而，对于平均表示形式如何影响深度信息的短期存储，人们知之甚少。为了评估在工作记忆中，平均表示形式对平面和深度信息的短期存储可能具有的不同作用，我们使用数学模型拟合了一项关于深度工作记忆和 12 项关于平面信息工作记忆的研究中收集的数据。假设存在报告平均深度而不是个体深度的概率，可以对所记忆的深度的召回模式进行很好的拟合，从而压缩了与感知距离相比刺激整体的前后距离。然而，当对召回的平面信息进行建模时，我们发现当目标未被记住时，参与者倾向于报告个体非目标特征，而仅在极少数研究中，报告平均信息的假设可以改善数据拟合。这些结果为我们的假设提供了证据，即平均深度信息可用作存储在工作记忆中的个体深度信息的替代物，但对于平面视觉特征，用平均信息替代目标的前提是要记住的特征的平均值很容易获取。
