Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome.
Laboratorio de Estudos de Linguagem, Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Lisbon.
Neuropsychology. 2023 Oct;37(7):741-752. doi: 10.1037/neu0000869. Epub 2022 Nov 10.
Retaining the identity or location of decontextualized objects in visual short-term working memory (VWM) is impaired by healthy and pathological ageing, but research remains inconclusive on whether these two features are equally impacted by it. Moreover, it is unclear whether similar impairments would manifest in naturalistic visual contexts.
30 people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and 32 age-matched control participants (CPs) were eye-tracked within a change detection paradigm. They viewed 120 naturalistic scenes, and after a retention interval (1 s) asked whether a critical object in the scene had (or not) changed on either: (became a different object), (same object but changed location), or (changed in location and identity).
MCIs performed worse than CP but there was no interaction with the type of change. Changes in were easiest while changes in identity alone were hardest. The latency to first fixation and first-pass duration to the critical object during successful recognition was not different between MCIs and CPs. Objects that changed in features took longer to be fixated for the first time but required a shorter first pass compared to changes in identity alone which displayed the opposite pattern.
Locations of objects are better remembered than their identities; memory for changes is best when involving both features. These mechanisms are spared by pathological ageing as indicated by the similarity between groups besides trivial differences in overall performance. These findings demonstrate that VWM mechanisms in the context of naturalistic scene information are preserved in people with MCI. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
在视觉工作记忆（VWM）中，语境化物体的身份或位置保持能力会因健康和病理性衰老而受损，但目前的研究结果仍不确定这两个特征是否同样受到影响。此外，在自然视觉环境中是否会出现类似的损伤还不清楚。
30 名轻度认知障碍（MCI）患者和 32 名年龄匹配的对照组（CPs）参与者在变化检测范式中进行了眼动追踪。他们观看了 120 个自然场景，在保留间隔（1 秒）后，他们被问到场景中的关键物体是否（或没有）发生了变化：（变成了不同的物体），（相同的物体但位置改变了），或（位置和身份都改变了）。
MCI 患者的表现比 CPs 差，但与变化类型没有交互作用。变化在 特征中最容易，而单独改变身份则最难。在成功识别时，首次注视的潜伏期和首次通过关键物体的持续时间在 MCI 和 CPs 之间没有差异。在首次注视时，改变 特征的物体需要更长的时间，但与单独改变身份相比，首次通过的时间更短，而单独改变身份的物体则呈现相反的模式。
物体的位置比其身份更容易被记住；当涉及到两个特征时，对变化的记忆最好。这些机制在病理性衰老中得以保留，这表明两组之间的相似性，除了整体表现上的微小差异。这些发现表明，在自然场景信息背景下，MCI 患者的 VWM 机制得以保留。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2023 APA，保留所有权利）。
