The influence of irrelevant mental representations on selective processing of visuo-spatial information in working memory

不相关的心理表征对工作记忆中视觉空间信息选择性加工的影响

• 批准号: 273892355
• 负责人: Dr. Daniel Schneider
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Forschungsbereich Ergonomie
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2014-12-31 至 2018-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/273892355?language=en
• 关键词: influence; irrelevant; mental; representations; selective

Visuo-spatial working memory enables the active maintenance of relevant information for further cognitive operations and the association with incoming signals. However, the limited working memory capacity requires a mechanism that allows the adaptation of stored mental representations to current behavioral goals. Comparable to perceptual processing, this adaption process is associated with the focusing of attention on relevant mental representations. This can be studied by means of experimental designs including a retroactive cue (retro cue) that indicates which stimuli of a previous memory array are relevant for further processing. The focusing of attention on working memory contents was suggested to protect the respective mental representations from further decay and from interference by distracting signals. However, it is not yet resolved how this protective mechanism is activated at the expense of an increased decay of irrelevant mental representations. By means of a new experimental design and EEG correlates of visuo-spatial working memory, the proposed experiments focus on the fate of irrelevant mental representations following selective retro cues. This also entails studying the temporal decay of irrelevant mental representations and investigating the contribution of excitatory vs. inhibitory mechanisms to the adaptation of visuo-spatial working memory contents. A further experiment investigates to what extent distracting signals can interfere with the selective retention of mental representations and how such effects might be subject to available working memory resources.

视空间工作记忆能够主动维持相关信息，以便进一步进行认知操作并与传入信号相关联。然而，有限的工作记忆容量需要一种机制，允许存储的心理表征适应当前的行为目标。与知觉加工相比，这种适应过程与注意力集中在相关的心理表征上有关。这可以通过实验设计来研究，包括回溯线索（retroactive cue），其指示先前存储器阵列的哪些刺激与进一步处理相关。将注意力集中在工作记忆内容上，可以保护各自的心理表征免受进一步的衰减和干扰。然而，这个保护机制是如何以不相关的心理表征的衰减增加为代价被激活的，这一点还没有解决。通过新的实验设计和视觉空间工作记忆的脑电相关性，拟议的实验重点关注选择性回溯线索后不相关心理表征的命运。这也需要研究不相关的心理表征的时间衰减，并调查兴奋性与抑制性机制对视觉空间工作记忆内容适应的贡献。进一步的实验研究在多大程度上分散注意力的信号可以干扰心理表征的选择性保留，以及这种影响如何可能会受到可用的工作记忆资源。