Huang Liqiang
Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
Nat Commun. 2025 Feb 5;16(1):1383. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-56700-5.
Two decades of research on visual working memory have produced substantial yet fragmented knowledge. This study aims to integrate these findings into a cohesive framework. Drawing on a large-scale behavioral experiment involving 40 million responses to 10,000 color patterns, a quasi-comprehensive exploration model of visual working memory, termed QCE-VWM, is developed. Despite its significantly reduced complexity (57 parameters versus 30,796), QCE-VWM outperforms neural networks in data fitting. The model provides an integrative framework for understanding human visual working memory, incorporating a dozen mechanisms-some directly adopted from previous studies, some modified, and others newly identified. This work underscores the value of large-scale behavioral experiments in advancing comprehensive models of cognitive mechanisms.
二十年来对视觉工作记忆的研究产生了大量但零散的知识。本研究旨在将这些发现整合到一个连贯的框架中。基于一项大规模行为实验，该实验涉及对10000种颜色图案的4000万次反应，开发了一种视觉工作记忆的准综合探索模型，称为QCE-VWM。尽管其复杂性显著降低（57个参数对30796个），但QCE-VWM在数据拟合方面优于神经网络。该模型为理解人类视觉工作记忆提供了一个综合框架，纳入了十几种机制——有些直接取自先前的研究，有些经过修改，还有一些是新发现的。这项工作强调了大规模行为实验在推进认知机制综合模型方面的价值。
