Visual short-term memory compared in rhesus monkeys and humans.
Visual short-term memory compared in rhesus monkeys and humans.
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DOI：
10.1016/j.cub.2011.04.031
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发表时间：
2011-06-07
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Wright AA
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Elmore LC;Ma WJ;Magnotti JF;Leising KJ;Passaro AD;Katz JS;Wright AA
变化检测是研究人类视觉短期记忆 (STM) 的一项热门任务。这项工作的大部分内容表明，STM 的固定容量为 4 ± 1 项。在这里，我们报告了人类和与人类密切相关的物种恒河猴之间变化检测记忆的首次比较。猴子和人类的测试程序几乎相同，显示尺寸重叠。尽管猴子的 STM 非常适合 1 项固定容量记忆模型，但其他使用 4 项列表的猴子记忆测试表明，使用 1 项容量不可能获得性能。我们建议，可以使用与记忆的神经基础更紧密联系的连续资源方法来解决这一矛盾。在此视图中，项目具有噪声内存表示，由于连续资源的分布式分配，其噪声水平取决于显示大小。根据这一理论，我们证明性能取决于变化前后项目之间的感知距离，而 d' 以近似幂律的方式取决于显示尺寸。我们的结果为结合心理物理学、计算和生理学的力量打开了大门，以更好地理解 STM 的神经基础。
Change detection is a popular task to study visual short-term memory (STM) in humans. Much of this work suggests that STM has a fixed capacity of 4 ± 1 items. Here we report the first comparison of change detection memory between humans and a species closely related to humans, the rhesus monkey. Monkeys and humans were tested in nearly identical procedures with overlapping display sizes. Although the monkeys’ STM was well fit by a 1-item fixed-capacity memory model, other monkey memory tests with 4-item lists have shown performance impossible to obtain with a 1-item capacity. We suggest that this contradiction can be resolved using a continuous-resource approach more closely tied to the neural basis of memory. In this view, items have a noisy memory representation whose noise level depends on display size due to distributed allocation of a continuous resource. In accord with this theory, we show that performance depends on the perceptual distance between items before and after the change, and d′ depends on display size in an approximately power law fashion. Our results open the door to combining the power of psychophysics, computation, and physiology to better understand the neural basis of STM.