Wang 王思思 Sisi, van Ede Freek
Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, Institute for Brain and Behavior Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam 1081 HV, The Netherlands.
Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, Institute for Brain and Behavior Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam 1081 HV, The Netherlands
J Neurosci. 2025 Sep 24;45(39):e0091252025. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0091-25.2025.
Finding what you are looking for is a ubiquitous task in everyday life that relies on a two-way comparison between what is currently viewed and internal search goals held in memory. Despite a wealth of studies tracking visual verification among external contents of perception, complementary verification processes among internal contents of memory remain elusive. Building on a recently established gaze marker of internal visual focusing in working memory, we uncover the internal inspection process associated with confirming or dismissing potential search targets. We show how male and female human participants "look back" into working memory when faced with external stimuli that are perceived as potential targets and link such internal inspection to the time needed for visual verification. A direct comparison between visual verification among the contents of working memory or perception further revealed how verification in both domains engages frontal theta activity in scalp electroencephalography but also how mnemonic verification is slower to deploy than perceptual verification. This establishes internal verification as an integral component of visual search and provides new ways to look into this underexplored component of human search behavior.
寻找你所寻找的东西是日常生活中一项普遍存在的任务，它依赖于当前所看到的内容与记忆中持有的内部搜索目标之间的双向比较。尽管有大量研究追踪了感知外部内容中的视觉验证，但记忆内部内容之间的互补验证过程仍然难以捉摸。基于最近在工作记忆中建立的内部视觉聚焦的注视标记，我们揭示了与确认或排除潜在搜索目标相关的内部检查过程。我们展示了男性和女性人类参与者在面对被视为潜在目标的外部刺激时如何“回顾”工作记忆，并将这种内部检查与视觉验证所需的时间联系起来。工作记忆或感知内容之间的视觉验证的直接比较进一步揭示了两个领域的验证如何在头皮脑电图中引发额叶θ活动，以及记忆验证比感知验证部署得更慢。这将内部验证确立为视觉搜索的一个不可或缺的组成部分，并为研究人类搜索行为中这个未被充分探索的组成部分提供了新方法。
