CAREER: Novel approaches to integrating color perception and color memory

视觉感知给我们关于世界上物体的信息。然而，为了使这些信息有用，它必须与记忆结合起来。例如，香蕉的黄色表示成熟，只有当它可以与区分成熟香蕉的黄色和未成熟香蕉的绿色的记忆相比较时。日常经验表明，虽然有时颜色记忆非常好（例如回忆起停车标志和香蕉的颜色），但也可能非常差（例如挑选与家里墙壁相配的油漆）。这种日常色彩记忆的经验反映了认知科学家和知觉科学家在色彩记忆的保真度上的深刻分歧。如何才能调和这些分歧？由美国国家科学基金会资助的研究由罗格斯大学的Sarah Allred博士进行，旨在提供一个统一颜色感知和不同颜色记忆观点的单一框架。人类观察者会在越来越复杂的环境中对相同的彩色刺激做出感知和记忆判断。这些数据将推动一个计算模型的发展，该模型旨在将颜色记忆描述为颜色感知和独立噪声的组合。这种观点与色彩记忆中流行的文化或语言相对性的说法相反。感知和记忆之间的关系在法医心理学（如目击者证词的可靠性）、军事侦察、认知心理学（如语言对记忆的影响）和医学诊断（如MRI图像上的黑云与肿瘤的记忆模板匹配吗？）等领域都很重要。这里的计算方法代表了感知和记忆研究的重要进展，因为它将为未来的研究提供基线比较。这项研究将使研究人员能够量化记忆中有多少是由感知所预测的。如果记忆是感知的可预测功能，那么有两个重要的含义：首先，基本的感知信息将允许对记忆的可靠性设置更合理的界限；其次，它表明在适当的感知环境中查询记忆可能会增加记忆的可靠性。虽然颜色是一种相对简单的刺激，用来探索感知和记忆之间的关系，但它是一个很好的初步近似，用于更复杂的刺激，如目击者证词或医学诊断。这是因为颜色足够简单，它的物理尺寸被很好地表征，因此使颜色适合计算建模；此外，与定向光栅等其他简单的物理刺激不同，颜色与情感和语言等高阶变量有关。因此，颜色在简单的物理刺激和具有现实适用性的更复杂的刺激之间提供了一个很好的桥梁。

Visual perception gives us information about objects in the world. For that information to be useful, however, it must be combined with memory. For example, the yellow color of a banana indicates ripeness only if it can be compared to a memory that distinguishes the yellow of ripe bananas from the green of unripe bananas. Everyday experience suggests that although sometimes color memory is very good (e.g. recalling the color of stop signs and bananas), it can also be very poor (e.g. picking out paint to match the walls at home). This everyday experience of color memory reflects a deep division between cognitive and perceptual scientists about the fidelity of color memory. How can these differences be reconciled? NSF-funded research conducted by Dr. Sarah Allred at Rutgers University aims to provide a single framework that unifies color perception and the disparate views of color memory. Human observers will make perceptual and memory judgments about the same colorful stimuli in progressively more complex environments. These data will then drive the development of a computational model that aims to describe color memory as a combination of color perception and independent noise. This view is in contrast to a prevailing account of cultural or linguistic relativity in color memory. The relationship between perception and memory is important to fields as varied as forensic psychology (e.g. the reliability of eyewitness testimony), military reconnaissance, cognitive psychology (e.g. linguistic effects on memory) and medical diagnosis (e.g. does a dark cloud on an MRI image match memory templates of tumors?). The computational approach here represents an important advance to the study of perception and memory, because it will provide a baseline comparison for future research. This study will allow researchers to quantify how much of what is remembered is predicted by what was perceived. If memory is a predictable function of perception, there are two important implications: first, basic perceptual information will allow more sensible bounds to be placed on the reliability of memory; second, it suggests the possibility that querying memory in the appropriate perceptual environment will increase the reliability of memory. Although color is a relatively simple stimulus with which to probe the relationship between perception and memory, it is a good first approximation for more complicated stimuli like those involved in eyewitness testimony or medical diagnosis. This is because color is simple enough that its physical dimensions are well-characterized, thus making color amenable to computational modeling; in addition, unlike other simple physical stimuli such as oriented gratings, color is linked to higher order variables like emotion and language. Thus color provides a good bridge between simple physical stimuli and more complex stimuli with real-world applicability.