Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA.
Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri, McAlester Hall, Columbia, MO, 65211, USA.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2022 Nov;84(8):2519-2539. doi: 10.3758/s13414-022-02549-5. Epub 2022 Sep 19.
Two of the most important concepts in working memory that differentiate many theories are the role of attention and similarity between items. Investigators have debated whether there is a central, general resource of attention, and whether interference between items depends mostly on their modality and type of code (i.e., verbal/acoustic versus visual/spatial coding) or upon multiple dimensions of feature similarity even within a modality. Here, we examine results from three experiments in which the features of items to be remembered differed for visual objects in color or orientation, or for acoustic objects in noise duration or tone pitch. There were one or two of these sets on a trial and, when there were two sets, the similarity between their features varied: there were sets in different modalities, sets with different feature types within a modality, or sets of the same feature type. One-set trials consistently produced superior performance. For two-set trials, dissimilarity of the sets mattered only when both sets had to be attended, compared with attention to only one set. Feature differences within a modality mattered at least as much as between-modality differences. The findings conflict with what would be expected if modality were the sole organizing principle and support a working memory model in which a capacity-limited attention is constrained by the feature similarity of task-relevant items.
工作记忆中两个最重要的概念是注意力的作用和项目之间的相似性,它们区分了许多理论。研究人员一直在争论是否存在一个中央的、通用的注意力资源,以及项目之间的干扰是否主要取决于它们的模态和类型的代码(即言语/听觉与视觉/空间编码),还是取决于甚至在一个模态内的多个特征相似性维度。在这里,我们检查了三个实验的结果,在这些实验中,要记住的项目的特征在颜色或方向上的视觉对象之间,或在噪声持续时间或音调音高上的声学对象之间有所不同。每次试验中只有一个或两个这样的集合,当有两个集合时,它们的特征之间的相似性有所不同:有不同模态的集合,同一模态内具有不同特征类型的集合,或具有相同特征类型的集合。一组试验始终产生更好的性能。对于两组试验,只有当必须同时关注两个集合时,集合之间的不相似性才会产生影响,而不是只关注一个集合。模态内的特征差异至少与模态间差异一样重要。这些发现与如果模态是唯一的组织原则所预期的结果相冲突,支持了一种工作记忆模型,其中容量有限的注意力受到任务相关项目特征相似性的限制。