Properties of Transsaccadic Memory

我们的眼睛每秒钟从一个物体移动到另一个物体好几次。我们用扫视的方式看世界——快速的眼球运动，中间是短暂的注视，其间眼睛相对静止。每次眼球运动都会导致视觉刺激扫过视网膜，产生通常无法察觉的模糊或污迹，因为在扫视期间视觉被抑制了。由于这种抑制，我们只有在注视时，也就是眼睛静止的时候，才能从世界中获得视觉信息。由于这个原因，我们对世界的视觉信息被记录在孤立的瞥见中，这些瞥见在时间上是分开的。此外，这些孤立的瞥见的内容是不相同的，因为当眼睛改变位置时，世界的不同区域落在视网膜的不同部分。尽管这种快速变化和不连续的视觉输入，我们通常认为世界是统一的，稳定的和连续的。知觉系统是如何做到这一点的，这个问题困扰了心理学家和视觉研究者一个多世纪。一个常见的假设是，个体注视的内容通过眼球运动在记忆中结合起来，产生对视觉环境的连贯的心理表征。本研究将探讨这一假设过程的特点。特别是，该研究将确定从一次注视到下一次注视时记住了多少信息，是否某些信息比其他信息更容易被记住，以及这些信息是如何在眼球运动中存储和组合的。实验过程将包括让个人观察者观看计算机终端屏幕上的视觉显示，同时他们的眼球运动被眼球追踪设备监控。在选定的眼球运动期间，视觉显示将消失，观察者对该显示的记忆将被评估。例如，观察者可以指示第二次显示是否与第一次显示相同或不同，尝试报告第一次显示中出现的某些特定信息，或者尽可能快地命名新显示中指示的对象。这些反应将揭示原始显示的哪些方面被存储在记忆中，在眼球运动中保持，并用于将连续的眼球注视相互联系起来。人们如何通过眼球运动来感知连续的视觉世界是知觉学中的一个经典问题。该研究将促进这一问题的解决。此外，这项研究将导致更复杂的空间表征和空间认知理论的发展。从实用的角度来看，这项研究将帮助人为因素工程师设计视觉显示，以及需要多眼注视显示的任务，以最大限度地利用操作员通过眼球运动组合不同类型视觉信息的能力或无能。＊＊＊

9309564 IRWIN Our eyes move from object to object in the world several times each second. We scan the world by means of saccades--fast eye movements that are separated by brief fixations during which the eyes are relatively still. Each eye movement causes visual stimulation to be swept across the retinas, producing a blur or smear that is not ordinarily perceived because vision is suppressed during saccades. Because of this suppression, we acquire visual information from the world only during fixations, when the eyes are still. For this reason, our visual information about the world is registered in isolated glimpses that are separated in time. Furthermore, the contents of these isolated glimpses are not identical, because different regions of the world fall on different parts of the retina when the eyes change position. Despite this rapidly changing and discontinuous visual input, we ordinarily perceive the world as unified, stable, and continuous. How the perceptual system accomplishes this has puzzled psychologists and vision researchers for over a century. One frequent hypothesis is that the contents of individual eye fixations are combined in memory across eye movements to produce a coherent mental representation of the visual environment. This research will investigate the characteristics of this hypothetical process. In particular, the research will determine how much information is remembered from one eye fixation to the next, whether some kinds of information are remembered better than others, and how this information is stored and combined across eye movements. The experimental procedure will involve having individual observers view visual displays on a computer terminal screen while their eye movements are monitored by an eyetracking device. During selected eye movements, the visual display will disappear and the observer's memory for that display will be assessed. For example, the observer may indicate whether a second display is identi cal to or different from the first display, attempt to report some particular information that was present in the first display, or name an indicated object in a new display as rapidly as possible. These responses will reveal what aspects of the original display are stored in memory, maintained across an eye movement, and used to relate successive eye fixations to each other. The question of how people perceive a continuous visual world across eye movements is a classic problem in perception. The research will advance the solution to this problem. In addition, the research will lead to the development of more sophisticated theories of spatial representation and spatial cognition in general. From a practical standpoint, the research will help human factors engineers design visual displays, and tasks that require multiple eye fixations on a display, to take best advantage of an operator's ability or inability to combine different kinds of visual information across eye movements. ***