Sahakian Andre, Gayet Surya, Paffen Chris L E, Van der Stigchel Stefan
Experimental Psychology, Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 1, 3584 CS, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Mem Cognit. 2025 May 6. doi: 10.3758/s13421-025-01718-9.
Visual working memory (VWM) is a cognitive system, which temporarily stores task-relevant visual information to enable interactions with the environment. In everyday VWM use, we typically decide how long we look to encode information, and how long we wait before acting on the memory. In contrast, VWM is typically studied in unnaturally rigid paradigms that keep presentation times and delays fixed. Here, we ask how visual memories build up over self-paced viewing times, and how they decay over self-paced delays, in a task that naturally engages VWM. We employed a copying task in which participants were tasked to recreate an "example" arrangement of items in an adjacent empty "workspace". We tracked their unconstrained viewing and copying behavior at the level of individual items' viewing times and the time to successful placements (i.e., delay). Our results show that performance monotonically increased for viewing times up to 1 s (per item), and plateaued afterwards. Interestingly, while views exceeding 1 s did not strongly improve performance for short (2-s) delays, views beyond 1-s did improve performance for longer delays. In contrast, this pattern was not observed in Experiments 2A and 2B, where viewing and delay times were experimentally manipulated (i.e., in more typical, rigid paradigms). These findings showcase the importance of considering aspects of naturalistic behavior, like decision-making, when studying VWM. We suggest that in everyday situations, short glances are sufficient for immediate use from VWM, but long views are required for effective delayed use.
视觉工作记忆（VWM）是一种认知系统，它临时存储与任务相关的视觉信息，以实现与环境的交互。在日常使用视觉工作记忆时，我们通常会决定注视多长时间来编码信息，以及在根据记忆采取行动之前等待多长时间。相比之下，视觉工作记忆的研究通常采用非自然的严格范式，即保持呈现时间和延迟固定不变。在此，我们探究在一项自然运用视觉工作记忆的任务中，视觉记忆如何在自定节奏的观看时间内形成，以及如何在自定节奏的延迟时间内衰退。我们采用了一项复制任务，让参与者在相邻的空“工作区”中重新创建一组物品的“示例”排列。我们在单个物品的观看时间和成功放置时间（即延迟）层面跟踪他们不受约束的观看和复制行为。我们的研究结果表明，观看时间长达1秒（每件物品）时，表现呈单调上升趋势，之后趋于平稳。有趣的是，虽然超过1秒的观看时间对短延迟（2秒）的表现提升不大，但对较长延迟的表现却有改善。相比之下，在实验2A和2B中未观察到这种模式，在这两个实验中，观看时间和延迟时间是通过实验控制的（即采用更典型、严格的范式）。这些发现凸显了在研究视觉工作记忆时考虑自然行为方面（如决策）的重要性。我们认为，在日常情况下，短暂扫视足以立即从视觉工作记忆中获取信息以供使用，但要有效地延迟使用则需要长时间注视。
