Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
J Vis. 2024 Sep 3;24(9):9. doi: 10.1167/jov.24.9.9.
The contents of visual perception are inherently dynamic-just as we experience objects in space, so too events in time. The boundaries between these events have downstream consequences. For example, memory for incidentally encountered items is impaired when walking through a doorway, perhaps because event boundaries serve as cues to clear obsolete information from previous events. Although this kind of "memory flushing" can be adaptive, work on visual working memory (VWM) has focused on the opposite function of active maintenance in the face of distraction. How do these two cognitive operations interact? In this study, observers watched animations in which they walked through three-dimensionally rendered rooms with picture frames on the walls. Within the frames, observers either saw images that they had to remember ("encoding") or recalled images they had seen in the immediately preceding frame ("test"). Half of the time, a doorway was crossed during the delay between encoding and test. Across experiments, there was a consistent memory decrement for the first image encoded in the doorway compared to the no-doorway condition while equating time elapsed, distance traveled, and distractibility of the doorway. This decrement despite top-down VWM efforts highlights the power of event boundaries to structure what and when we forget.
视觉感知的内容本质上是动态的——就像我们在空间中体验物体一样，时间中的事件也是如此。这些事件之间的边界有下游的后果。例如，当我们走过一扇门时，我们对偶然遇到的物品的记忆会受到损害，这可能是因为事件边界充当了从先前事件中清除过时信息的提示。尽管这种“记忆刷新”可能是适应性的，但视觉工作记忆（VWM）的研究主要集中在面对分心时主动维持的相反功能上。这两种认知操作如何相互作用？在这项研究中，观察者观看了动画，他们在三维渲染的房间里走过，墙上有画框。在画框内，观察者要么看到他们必须记住的图像（“编码”），要么回忆他们在前一个帧中看到的图像（“测试”）。一半的时间，在编码和测试之间的延迟期间会穿过一扇门。在不同的实验中，尽管有自上而下的 VWM 努力，但在门的条件下，第一幅图像的记忆会有一致的衰减，而与门的时间、距离和分心无关。尽管有自上而下的 VWM 努力，但这种衰减突出了事件边界在构建我们遗忘的内容和时间方面的强大作用。
