Seamless Cognition: Visual Processing at the Intersection of Different Cognitive Faculties

不同认知能力的无缝整合（即，知觉、注意力、视觉短期记忆（VSTM）、长期记忆（LTM）是人类心智成熟的标志之一。在孤立地理解这些过程方面已经取得了很大进展，但关于它们如何相互交叉的知识是有限的。 例如，视觉LTM和VSTM在表示精度上具有相同的限制，但不清楚是否相同的因素有助于LTM和VSTM的表示精度。我的实验室通过研究记忆干扰的过程，测试了记忆精度和可访问性的问题：竞争信息对任务相关处理的破坏。在LTM研究中，相似性假设认为，干扰信息与记忆内容的相似性越大，记忆损伤的程度越大。记忆障碍有不同的风格;在干扰之后，学习过的信息可能会以降低的精度保留下来，或者完全删除。 先前的研究缺乏解决这两个选择的办法，因为他们使用离散的，被迫选择的反应。使用一个连续的自由回忆任务与混合建模估计擦除和降解的单独贡献，我们发现，干扰高度不相似的项目导致记忆擦除和干扰的中间相似性降低记忆的精度。参与者通常会抵制高度相似物品的干扰。因此，我们证明了相似性假设并不普遍成立：视觉相似性的本质可能会使平衡朝着牺牲记忆精度而有利于记忆可及性的方向倾斜，反之亦然。 我现在提出一个新的研究计划，将揭示认知的不同方面如何相互通知。我建议关注颜色空间中的特定值可以增强对该值的处理，并减弱对高度相似但不相同的颜色值的处理，类似于环绕声抑制。在相关的工作中，我们将表明，任务无关的新奇性的检测将调制VSTM精度。最后，我们将使用集合统计方法来证明早期视觉皮层可以代表看不见的物体。我和我的学员将从行为上和不同的神经成像方法（例如，EEG和fMRI）。 该研究计划的总体目标是确定实现无缝认知的基本认知和神经过程。我们的主观经验很少强调从一种认知能力到另一种认知能力的转换;相反，我们毫不费力地在不同的时间尺度上进行各种认知操作。这些不同的认知能力可能具有相反或互补的加工偏差。我们将展示这些过程是如何相互加强或相互削弱的。

The seamless integration of different cognitive faculties (i.e., perception, attention, visual short-term memory - VSTM, long-term memory - LTM), is one of the hallmarks of the human mind's sophistication. Much progress has been made in understanding these processes in isolation but knowledge about how they intersect is limited. For example, visual LTM and VSTM have the same limit on representational precision but it is unclear if the same factors contribute to the precision of representations across LTM and VSTM. My lab has tested issues around memory precision and accessibility by studying the process of memory interference: the disruption of task-relevant processing by competing information. In LTM research, the similarity assumption holds that one's degree of memory impairment increases with the similarity between interfering information and memory contents. Memory impairments come in different flavors; following interference, studied information may be retained with degraded precision or erased completely. Prior studies lacked the resolution to disentangle these two alternatives, as they used discrete, forced-choice responses. Using a continuous free-recall task with mixture modeling to estimate the separate contributions of erasing and degrading, we found that interference from highly dissimilar items resulted in memory erasure and that interference from items of intermediate similarity degraded memory's precision. Participants typically resisted interference from highly similar items. Thus we demonstrated that the similarity assumption does not hold universally: the nature of visual similarity may tip the balance towards sacrificing memory precision in favor of memory accessibility, or vice versa. I am now proposing a novel program of study that will uncover how different aspects of cognition inform each other. I am proposing that attending to a specific value in colour space enhances the processing of that value and attenuates the processing of highly-similar but nonidentical colour values, akin to surround suppression. In a related line of work, we will show that the detection of task-irrelevant novelty will modulate VSTM precision. Finally, we will use an ensemble statistics approach to show that early visual cortex can represent unseen objects. My trainees and I will test our hypotheses behaviourally and with different neuroimaging approaches (e.g., EEG and fMRI). The overarching goal of this program of research is to identify the foundational cognitive and neural processes that enable seamless cognition. Rarely does our subjective experience highlight a switch from one cognitive faculty to another; instead, we effortlessly access various cognitive operations across different timescales. These different cognitive faculties may have opposing or complementary processing biases. We will show how these processes mutually accentuate or attenuate each other.