School of Education, University of California-Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA.
MIND Research Institute, Irvine, CA, USA.
Sci Rep. 2022 Jul 25;12(1):12646. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-15649-x.
Previous cognitive training research with the change-detection paradigm found only sparse effects that went beyond improvements in the training task but stressed an increase in fidelity of internal memory representations. Motivated by the demanding visual processing requirements of change-detection training, we extended this work by focusing on whether training on a change-detection task would improve visual processing skills. Fifty participants were randomly assigned to train on a change-detection task or on a control task for seven sessions. Participants' visual processing skills were assessed before and after the intervention, focusing on visual search, contrast sensitivity, and contour integration. Our results suggest a general improvement in perceptual skills that was primarily driven by a conjunction search task and to a much lesser extent by a complex visual search task and a contrast sensitivity task. The data from the conjunction search task further suggest a causal link between training and improvements of perceptual as opposed to attentional processes. Since the change-detection paradigm is commonly used to assess working memory capacity, future research needs to investigate how much of its variance is explained by memory performance and how much is explained by perceptual processes.
先前使用变化检测范式的认知训练研究发现，其效果仅局限于训练任务的改善，而强调了内部记忆表现的保真度的提高。受变化检测训练对视觉处理要求的启发，我们通过关注变化检测任务的训练是否会提高视觉处理技能来扩展这项工作。五十名参与者被随机分配到变化检测任务或控制任务中进行七次训练。在干预前后，参与者的视觉处理技能都进行了评估，重点是视觉搜索、对比敏感度和轮廓整合。我们的结果表明，感知技能得到了普遍提高，这主要是由一个联合搜索任务驱动的，而在很大程度上则是由一个复杂的视觉搜索任务和一个对比敏感度任务驱动的。来自联合搜索任务的数据进一步表明，训练与感知过程的提高而不是注意过程的提高之间存在因果关系。由于变化检测范式常用于评估工作记忆容量，因此未来的研究需要调查其变化中有多少是由记忆表现解释的，有多少是由感知过程解释的。
