ISSN 0439-755X
CN 11-1911/B
主办:中国心理学会
   中国科学院心理研究所
出版:科学出版社

心理学报 ›› 2017, Vol. 49 ›› Issue (5): 590-601.doi: 10.3724/SP.J.1041.2017.00590

• 论文 • 上一篇    下一篇

无关长时记忆表征能否引导视觉注意选择?

胡岑楼; 张 豹; 黄 赛   

  1. (广州大学心理系/广东省未成年人心理健康与教育认知神经科学实验室, 广州 510006)
  • 收稿日期:2016-04-22 发布日期:2017-05-25 出版日期:2017-05-25
  • 通讯作者: 黄赛, E-mail: sai.huang@139.com, 张豹, E-mail: bao.zhang@139.com
  • 基金资助:

    国家自然科学基金项目(31200854, 31571144, 31271113)资助。

Does irrelevant long-term memory representation guide the deployment of visual attention?

HU Cenlou; ZHANG Bao; HUANG Sai   

  1. (Department of Psychology / The Key Laboratory for Juveniles Mental Health and Educational Neuroscience in Guangdong Province, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou 510006, China)
  • Received:2016-04-22 Online:2017-05-25 Published:2017-05-25
  • Contact: HUANG Sai, E-mail: sai.huang@139.com, ZHANG Bao, E-mail: bao.zhang@139.com

摘要:

与任务相关的长时记忆表征在引导视觉注意选择的过程中扮演着重要的角色, 它可以使人们在熟悉的视觉情境中快速搜索目标刺激, 并偏离干扰刺激。但当长时记忆表征与任务无关时, 还能否引导视觉注意选择?目前还不清楚。实验1采用眼动追踪技术直接比较无关工作记忆表征与无关长时记忆表征在视觉搜索阶段对视觉注意的捕获效应, 行为反应时与首次注视点百分率的结果都发现, 当无关工作记忆表征在视觉搜索中再次出现时能引导视觉注意偏向到与之匹配的干扰刺激, 但无关长时记忆表征并没有表现出类似的注意引导效应; 实验2探讨记忆表征由工作记忆系统转移到长时记忆系统的过程中对视觉注意的引导效应, 结果发现, 随着记忆表征的转移, 注意引导效应消失了, 实验3排除工作记忆表征的干扰后, 依然没有发现无关长时记忆表征对注意的引导效应。以上结果表明, 无关长时记忆表征并不能像工作记忆表征一样引导视觉注意选择, 工作记忆表征和长时记忆表征对视觉注意的引导属于两个不同的认知过程。

关键词: 长时记忆, 选择性注意, 注意引导, 认知控制

Abstract:

The capacity of information processing system for human being is severely limited, but humans are proficient in searching for target information in the familiar visual scenes, in part because the task-relevant long-term memory (LTM) representations can efficiently guide attentional deployment to optimize the selection to the target and the escapement from the distractors. Hence, LTM-guided attention is key to our high level of visual performance, serving to direct our limited attentional resources efficiently. However, the issue whether irrelevant LTM representations can guide the deployment of visual attention as well as the irrelevant working memory (WM) representation is elusive yet. Therefore, we attempted to explore this issue here via three experiments. In experiment 1, participants were asked to maintain an object in LTM before the experiment initialized until to the end. During the experiment, participants were required to perform a visual search task while holding another object in WM online. In the visual search task, one of the distractor might share common features with either the representation of LTM or the representation of WM occasionally. Both the results of the response time and the first fixation proportion showed that the visual attention would bias to the distractor when sharing common features with the WM representation, displaying an classical WM-driven attentional guidance effect; however, non-guidance effect was found when the distractor shared common features with LTM representation. More importantly, the magnitude of guidance from WM representation was not affected by the simultaneously- emerged LTM representation which was regarded as a directly competitor for the attentional resources in the visual search display. In experiment 2, we manipulated the repetition times of the remembering object as the task used by Carlisle, Arita, Pardo & Woodman (2011), and aimed to test the attentional guidance from the memory representation while it was transferred from WM to LTM. The results observed an obvious attentional guidance effect from the memory representation when it was regarded as being maintained in WM (i.e., when the remembering object repeated less than three times) and this guidance effect disappeared when the memory representation was turned into LTM representation (i.e., when the remembering object repeated more than three times). In experiment 3, we required participants only keeping the LTM representation in memory system as to eliminate the possible interference from WM representation, and remain did not found any attentional guidance effect from the irrelevant LTM representation. In conclusion, the results of the present study observed a robust attentional guidance from the WM representation even when it not severing as search target template and sharing features with distractor in visual search task, in contrast, none such effect was found from the LTM representation under the same situation. These results indicated that the irrelevant LTM representation could not guide visual attention as well as irrelevant WM representation, and illustrated that the guiding process of visual attention from the representations of WM and LTM were two of distinct cognitive processes.

Key words: long-term memory, selective attention, attentional guidance, cognitive control