Compression in Visual Working Memory: Using Statistical Regularities to Form More Efficient Memory Representations
Compression in Visual Working Memory: Using Statistical Regularities to Form More Efficient Memory Representations
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DOI：
10.1037/a0016797
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发表时间：
2009-11-01
影响因子：
4.1
通讯作者：
Alvarez, George A.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Brady, Timothy F.;Konkle, Talia;Alvarez, George A.
个人可以在工作记忆中保存的信息相当有限，但研究人员通常使用简单的对象或字母串来研究这种能力，它们之间没有关联。然而，在现实世界中，输入中存在很强的关联性和规律性。在信息论意义上，正则性引入了冗余，使输入更具可压缩性。目前的研究表明，观察者可以利用这些冗余，使他们能够记住工作记忆中更多的项目。在两个实验中，在显示器的颜色之间引入协方差，以便在试验中出现一些颜色对比其他颜色对更有可能出现。观察者从这些展品中记住的物品比从随机配色的展品中记住的更多。记忆性能的提高不能简单地通过猜测高概率的颜色对来解释，这表明观察者形成了更有效的表征来记住更多的项目。此外，随着观察者学习到这些规律，他们的工作记忆性能得到了改善，这种改善可以通过贝叶斯学习模型和最优编码方案进行定量预测。这些结果表明，个体工作记忆的潜在容量没有变化。但他们必须记住的信息可以以更压缩的方式进行编码。
The information that individuals can hold in working memory is quite limited, but researchers have typically studied this capacity using simple objects or letter strings with no associations between them. However, in the real world there are strong associations and regularities in the input. In an information theoretic sense, regularities introduce redundancies that make the input more compressible. The current study shows that observers can take advantage of these redundancies, enabling them to remember more items in working memory. In 2 experiments, covariance was introduced between colors in a display so that over trials some color pairs were more likely to appear than other color pairs. Observers remembered more items from these displays than from displays where the colors were paired randomly. The improved memory performance cannot be explained by simply guessing the high-probability color pair, suggesting that observers formed more efficient representations to remember more items. Further, as observers learned the regularities, their working memory performance improved in a way that is quantitatively predicted by a Bayesian learning model and optimal encoding scheme. These results suggest that the underlying capacity of the individuals' working memory is unchanged. but the information they have to remember can be encoded in a more compressed fashion.