两个实验分别考察外显和内隐言语记忆中的特征维度信息对基于维度的视觉选择性注意的自动引导作用。实验一要求被试在言语工作记忆(外显言语记忆)保持阶段完成一个视觉注意任务,结果发现了显著的一致性效应,即记忆任务相关维度和注意任务相关维度不一致条件下的注意任务反应时要显著慢于两者一致条件下的反应时;实验二采用go/no-go任务以考察内隐言语记忆对视觉选择的影响,结果也发现了类似的一致性效应。这些结果表明外显和内隐言语记忆中的抽象维度信息自动引导注意选择视场中与之匹配的视觉维度,而不管该维度是否为当前注意任务的相关维度。
According to the biased competition model of Desimone and Duncan(1995),the contents of working memory(WM) may be crucial to resolve the competition for selection amongst different stimuli in the visual scene.Feedback from the item maintained in WM can strengthen the matching representation in early visual cortex,allowing it to win the competition for selection against the other non-matching representations.Previous studies have shown clear evidence that visual WM can automatically guide attention in some conditions,which can be established on both feature-based(e.g.,Soto,Heinke,Humphreys, Blanco,2005) and dimension-based(e.g.,Pan,Xu, Soto,2009) matching between memory and attention tasks.Moreover,Soto and Humphreys(2007) demonstrated that when the memory item was verbally represented,the feature-based effect could occur only when there were explicit memory requirements for observers.In other words,implicit verbal memory was not sufficient to automatically bias attention in favor of feature-matching stimuli in the field.In the current study,the author assessed the effects of explicit/implicit verbal memory on dimension-based visual selection.Here,the questions to be tested were that(1) whether the dimensional information held in verbal WM could guide attention to select the matching dimension of objects in the visual scene? and(2) if the answer was yes,then whether explicit memory of verbal stimuli was necessary for this dimension-based effect? The present study included two experiments.Experiment 1 explored the effect of explicit verbal memory on visual selection.Twelve naive students participated for cash compensation,and all of them reported having normal or corrected-to-normal visual acuity and normal color vision.All participants were right-handed.The experiment was programmed using Presentation(Version 0.71),and was run on a Pentium IV computer with a 17-inch color monitor.Participants were asked to discriminate whether the colors(or the shapes) of the two objects simu