Department of Psychology, Soochow University, Suzhou, China.
Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
J Vis. 2024 Sep 3;24(9):5. doi: 10.1167/jov.24.9.5.
Our brains do not always encode visual information in a veridical way. Visual working memory (WM) for features such as color can be biased. WM bias comes from several sources. Category priors can lead to WM bias. For example, color WM is biased toward or away from category prototypes. In addition to category knowledge, contextual factors can induce and modulate WM bias; however, these biases of different sources have usually been investigated independently with different tasks. The present study sought to explore how color WM is influenced by both color category and concurrent distractor. Specifically, we asked participants to retain two color items in WM to investigate how the WM representation of the target color is biased by learned category knowledge and contextual inter-item interactions. Our study found that the WM representation of the target color is biased toward or away from the category prototypes and away from the distractor color that is simultaneously held in WM, indicating that both color category and concurrent distractor bias color WM. More importantly, the weight of these two biases depends on the specific color category, suggesting that category priors and inter-item interaction biases are not simply additive but flexible. Furthermore, we revealed that both types of biases arise from perceptual processes.
我们的大脑并非总是以真实的方式对视觉信息进行编码。例如，颜色等特征的视觉工作记忆（WM）可能存在偏差。WM 偏差有几个来源。类别先验可以导致 WM 偏差。例如，颜色 WM 偏向或远离类别原型。除了类别知识外，上下文因素也可以引起和调节 WM 偏差；然而，这些不同来源的偏差通常是使用不同的任务独立进行研究的。本研究旨在探讨颜色 WM 如何同时受到颜色类别和同时存在的分心物的影响。具体来说，我们要求参与者在 WM 中保留两个颜色项目，以调查目标颜色的 WM 表示如何受到习得的类别知识和上下文项目间相互作用的影响。我们的研究发现，目标颜色的 WM 表示偏向于或远离类别原型，并且远离同时在 WM 中保持的分心物颜色，这表明颜色类别和同时存在的分心物都会对颜色 WM 产生偏差。更重要的是，这两种偏差的权重取决于特定的颜色类别，这表明类别先验和项目间相互作用偏差不是简单的加性的，而是灵活的。此外，我们揭示了这两种偏差都源于感知过程。
