Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Attentional selection does not only exist in the visual processing, but also points to a number of short-stored memory representations. At the behavioral level, both types of attentional mechanisms exert a facilitatory effect on the task performance. Besides, this facilitatory effect is stable across different patterns of attentional distribution. At the neural level, on the one hand, due to the fact that the encoding and short-term storage of the visual information are mainly processed in the occipital region (V1~V4) topologically related to retina, these regions can thus serve as a valid platform for the operation of the two types of attentional selection; on the other hand, the controlling signal from dorsal fronto-parietal network could modulate the selective attention processing in the visual cortex in a top-down manner, which consequently facilitates the priority of the target processing. These new evidence indicating that both types of attentional selection may arise from a unified control mechanism. At the same time, the neural frameworks described in this article also provide a new perspective for re-understanding of the relationship between attention and visual working memory.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： When the associations among objects in the scene tend to remain unchanged as the time progressed, the repeated associations would guide attention to the target’s location more efficiently compared with the new context that changed across blocks, which is known as the contextual cuing effect. Though the process of the spatial layout has been widely interpreted, some studies that has investigated the role of object’s identities in contextual cuing effect were limited to the Euclidean property. The topological property, one of the most important objects’ identities referring to visual perception, was largely neglected. In this study, we aimed to manipulate configurations with topological property, Euclidean property, combined property as well as random configurations to test whether the predictability of the target associated with the topological property has the superiority relative to the Euclidean property. In Experiment one, a classic contextual cuing task was performed. Four types of configurations were randomly presented in the experiment. Experiment two was divided into two sessions, the studying session and the testing session. In the studying session, 24 configurations were repeated throughout the entire session, which was used to develop the learning effect. In the testing session, the previous 24 configurations were transformed into three groups, the topological repeated configurations, the Euclidean repeated configurations and the combined configurations. Meanwhile, eight random configurations were introduced as the baseline to measure the contextual cuing effect. In Experiment three, after the regularities of contexts had been learned, the topological properties of the target (experiment 3a) or distractors (experiment 3b) had been changed respectively. We explore whether topological changed configurations could capture attention by generating “new object” or lift the bound between topological regularities of the context and corresponding spatial layouts. In Experiment one, the main effects and the interaction between configuration and epoch were significant, indicating that all the three different repeated configurations obtained a remarkable contextual cuing effect. Further analysis showed that the reaction time in topological repeated configuration was faster than that in the random configuration in the 1st epoch, while the Euclidean repeated configuration had faster RTs than the random configuration from the 2nd epoch. In Experiment two, only the main effect of epoch was significant for the studying session, revealing an obvious learning effect. After configurations transformed, compared to the matched configurations in the learning session, RTs in both the topological repeated configuration and the Euclidean repeated configuration were significantly increased. Furthermore, the RTs of the topological repeated configuration were faster than the random configuration, while the RTs of the Euclidean repeated configuration were slower than the random configuration. The results demonstrated that the object’s property played an important role in contextual cuing effect, and the stability of topological-target associations made a greater contribution than Euclidean-target associations did in maintaining the contextual cuing effect. In Experiment three, both sub-experiments showed a significant learning effect in the studying session. For the testing session of Experiment 3a, the reaction time was not affected when the topological property of the target has changed. However, the accuracy of the topological changed configuration was significantly decreased than the topological repeated configuration of the Experiment 3b. Thus, Experiment three clarified the increased reaction time in the Euclidean repeated configuration, suggesting that contextual regularities of topological properties were bound to corresponding spatial layout. When topological regularities distorted, the "contextual confusion" came forth and made participants unable to utilize the context to guide attention to the target location effectively. For the first time, we have verified that the associations between objects’ topological property and the target could produce behavioral benefit than the Euclidean associations do. The association could probably be regarded as an informative cue to guide attention to the target location more efficiently. Nevertheless, the predictability of topological configuration takes priorities over Euclidean configuration during the learning course, and the association between objects’ topological property and the target has a more important significance in maintaining the contextual cuing effect.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Studies on how long-term memory affects working memory (WM) have found that long-term memory can enhance WM processing. However, these studies only use item memory as the representation of long-term memory. In addition to item memory, associative memory is also an essential part of long-term memory. The associative memory and item memory involve different cognitive mechanisms and brain areas. The purpose of the present study was to investigate how associative memory affects WM processing. Before the WM task, participants were asked to store 16 pairs of dissimilar pictures into long-term memory. The participants would obtain the associative memory of these pairs of pictures in the long-term memory. The WM task was a change detection paradigm. Memory pictures in the memory array appeared in pairs (associative condition) or out of pairs (independent condition). In Experiment 1, the memory array with 6 items (3 pairs) was presented for 500 ms or 1000 ms. After a 1000 ms interval, participants needed to determine whether the probe item was the same as the memory array. The design and procedure of Experiment 2 were similar to those of Experiment 1, except that memory array was presented for only 500 ms, and 2 items (1 pairs) and 4 terms (2 pairs) were added in set size condition. Alpha power of electroencephalogram (EEG) was also collected and analyzed in Experiment 2. The results in Experiment 1 showed that WM capacity and accuracy were significantly lower in the associative condition than in the independent condition (for both presentation-time conditions: 500ms and 1000ms). The results in Experiment 2 showed that the alpha power in the independent condition increased as the memory set size increased (2 items < 4 items < 6 items), while the alpha power in the associative condition reached the asymptote when the set size was 4 (2 items < 4 items = 6 items). Both of these two experiments' results showed that WM capacity in the associative condition was lower than that in the independent condition. In conclusion, long-term associative representations inhibit the current WM processing and decrease WM capacity. This inhibitory effect is not affected by the length of encoding time. It implies that the reason for the increase of WM load by associative memory may come from the disorder of attention distribution.
Hits
Hits
Downloads
Comment