Guo Lijing, Park Hyung-Bum, Ren Guofang, Liu Penglan, Liu Ruyi, Nie Dan, Ye Chaoxiong
School of Education, Anyang Normal University, Anyang, China.
Department of Psychology, University of Jyvaskyla, Jyvaskyla, Finland.
Sci Rep. 2025 May 14;15(1):16700. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-00433-4.
Visual working memory (VWM) is critical for temporarily storing and manipulating visual information but is limited in capacity. Previous research suggests that perceptual organization, such as grouping identical objects, may alleviate VWM resource constraints, yet the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. This study investigated whether identical orientation stimuli reduce VWM resource consumption and whether this reduction occurs during encoding or maintenance phase. Using the contralateral delay activity (CDA), an event-related potential (ERP) component that indexes the number of items stored in VWM, we examined three memory conditions: all-same (i.e., four identical orientations), partial-same (i.e., two pairs of identical orientations), and all-different (i.e., four different orientations) conditions. Behavioral results showed improved VWM performance as the number of identical orientations increased, with the highest performance in the all-same condition. ERP results revealed no significant differences in early CDA amplitudes across conditions, suggesting that identical stimuli do not reduce VWM resource consumption during early maintenance phase. However, late CDA amplitudes were significantly reduced in the all-same condition compared to the partial-same and all-different conditions, indicating that the benefits of identical objects emerge during the late maintenance phase. Notably, partially identical stimuli did not reduce VWM load, highlighting the complexity of integrating partially redundant information. These findings highlight the distinct contributions of early consolidation and maintenance phases in optimizing VWM through perceptual grouping and provide evidence that the facilitative effect of identical objects relies on their complete repetition and late-stage cognitive processes.
视觉工作记忆（VWM）对于临时存储和处理视觉信息至关重要，但容量有限。先前的研究表明，诸如将相同物体分组之类的知觉组织可能会减轻VWM资源限制，但其潜在机制仍不清楚。本研究调查了相同方向刺激是否会减少VWM资源消耗，以及这种减少是在编码阶段还是维持阶段发生。使用对侧延迟活动（CDA），一种索引存储在VWM中的项目数量的事件相关电位（ERP）成分，我们检查了三种记忆条件：全相同（即四个相同方向）、部分相同（即两对相同方向）和全不同（即四个不同方向）条件。行为结果表明，随着相同方向数量的增加，VWM表现得到改善，在全相同条件下表现最佳。ERP结果显示，各条件下早期CDA振幅无显著差异，表明相同刺激在早期维持阶段不会减少VWM资源消耗。然而，与部分相同和全不同条件相比，全相同条件下晚期CDA振幅显著降低，表明相同物体的益处出现在晚期维持阶段。值得注意的是，部分相同的刺激并没有降低VWM负荷，这突出了整合部分冗余信息的复杂性。这些发现突出了早期巩固和维持阶段在通过知觉分组优化VWM方面的不同贡献，并提供了证据表明相同物体的促进作用依赖于它们的完全重复和后期认知过程。
