Yu Xinchi, Thakurdesai Sanikaa P, Xie Weizhen
Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park.
Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2025 Jun 26. doi: 10.1037/xhp0001347.
Integrating prior semantic knowledge with environmental information is essential for everyday cognition, yet how this process affects ongoing perception and memory remains a vexing problem. We investigate this by studying how associative semantic knowledge interacts with perceptual constraints induced by brief encoding times, thereby supporting visual working memory (VWM) for real-world objects. Study 1 reanalyzed data from Quirk et al. (2020), involving 75 participants across 13,750 trials of a VWM task with randomly chosen objects and verbal distraction. We found that objects' semantic associations, estimated by a natural language processing model, predicted trial-level VWM accuracy under brief but not prolonged encoding times (0.2 s vs. 1-2 s). These results, unaffected by image similarity from computer vision models, were replicated in Study 2 with 50 participants across 11,880 trials. Combined, these findings suggest that semantic associations between arbitrary object pairs can facilitate effective grouping among VWM items to mitigate perceptual constraints, highlighting the broad influence of semantic knowledge in VWM formation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
将先前的语义知识与环境信息相结合对日常认知至关重要，但这一过程如何影响正在进行的感知和记忆仍然是一个棘手的问题。我们通过研究联想语义知识如何与短暂编码时间所引发的感知限制相互作用来探究这一问题，从而支持对现实世界物体的视觉工作记忆（VWM）。研究1重新分析了Quirk等人（2020年）的数据，该研究涉及75名参与者，进行了13750次视觉工作记忆任务试验，试验中的物体是随机选择的，并伴有言语干扰。我们发现，由自然语言处理模型估计的物体语义关联在短暂而非延长的编码时间（0.2秒与1 - 2秒）下能够预测试验水平的视觉工作记忆准确性。这些结果不受计算机视觉模型图像相似度的影响，并在研究2中得到了重复验证，研究2有50名参与者，进行了11880次试验。综合来看，这些发现表明任意物体对之间的语义关联能够促进视觉工作记忆项目之间的有效分组，以减轻感知限制，突出了语义知识在视觉工作记忆形成中的广泛影响。（PsycInfo数据库记录（c）2025美国心理学会，保留所有权利）
