Department of Psychology and School of Brain Sciences and Cognition, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel.
Sci Rep. 2024 Apr 5;14(1):7987. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-58685-5.
While a vast amount of research has focused on understanding the capacity limits of visual working memory (VWM), little is known about how VWM resources are employed in unforced behavior and how they correlate with individual capacity constraints. We present a novel, openly available, and easy-to-administer paradigm enabling participants to freely utilize their VWM capacity. Participants had to reconstruct an array of colored squares. In each trial, they were allowed to alternate between the memory array and the reconstruction screen as many times as they wished, each time choosing how many items to reconstruct. This approach allowed us to estimate the number of utilized items, as well as the accuracy of the reconstruction. In addition, VWM capacity was measured using a change detection task. In two experiments, we show that participants tend to under-utilize their VWM resources, performing well below their capacity limits. Surprisingly, while the extent to which participants utilized their VWM was highly reliable, it was uncorrelated with VWM capacity, suggesting that VWM utilization is limited due to strategic considerations rather than capacity limits.
虽然大量研究集中于理解视觉工作记忆（VWM）的容量限制，但对于 VWM 资源如何在非强制行为中被利用以及它们与个体容量限制的相关性知之甚少。我们提出了一种新颖的、开放获取的、易于管理的范式，使参与者能够自由地利用他们的 VWM 容量。参与者必须重建一个彩色方块的数组。在每次试验中，他们可以根据自己的意愿在记忆数组和重建屏幕之间交替多次，每次选择要重建的项目数量。这种方法允许我们估计使用的项目数量以及重建的准确性。此外，使用变化检测任务来测量 VWM 容量。在两个实验中，我们表明参与者倾向于未充分利用他们的 VWM 资源，表现远低于其容量限制。令人惊讶的是，虽然参与者利用 VWM 的程度高度可靠，但与 VWM 容量无关，这表明 VWM 利用受到策略性考虑的限制，而不是容量限制。
