What limits visual working memory?

该奖项全部或部分由《2021年美国救援计划法案》（公法117-2）资助。记住和思考之前看到的东西——被称为视觉工作记忆（VWM）——是非常困难的。人们不断地使用他们有限的VWM来完成基本的任务，比如驾驶汽车或快速找到他们刚刚放下的眼镜。因为VWM与智力有关，所以VWM会影响学业和职业表现。VWM随着年龄增长、疾病（如多动症或精神分裂症）和脑损伤而退化。就像机械系统的调整或维修需要对系统的构建方式有所了解一样，改善VWM的干预将受益于对工作记忆系统架构的了解。为了更全面地了解VWM的结构及其与思维其他方面的关系，需要新的研究基础设施。然后，这个基础设施将使将来能够研究很少研究的VWM容量限制（超出可以存储的信息量）与思维和感知的关系，这反过来将表明，关于已经得到充分研究的VWM存储容量的已知信息是否可以推广到VWM的其他重要限制。为了使未来的研究成为可能，目前的研究将反复设计和试点组件研究任务，最终形成一个大约8小时的可扩展的认知测试套件，作为上述未来健康年轻人VWM研究的基础设施。此外，这一基础设施最终将有助于进一步研究VWM在生命周期中以及在疾病和/或神经损伤人群中如何变化。迄今为止，绝大多数视距记忆的研究都集中在存储容量上，但忽视了信息如何从视觉感知转移到视距记忆（称为巩固），以及如何将彼此相邻的记忆分开保存（称为分辨率）。巩固决定了看到的东西是否能在被分心干扰之前进入记忆。分辨率决定了记住一个项目是否意味着对附近其他项目的记忆不太准确。理解这些限制对于从实验室推广到现实世界至关重要，在现实世界中，物体和事件彼此接近，并且经常分散注意力。这项研究将使未来能够测量个体在存储、巩固和分辨率方面的差异；其他类型的工作记忆；关注;以及使用计算机任务的执行控制。这些数据可以用来确定这些不同的容量限制是如何相互关联的。这对科学来说很重要，因为工作记忆是否应该被认为是由一个单一的资源限制的，这个资源是为不同类型的记忆表征和过程共享的，还是作为一系列不同的系统，每个系统都有自己单独的容量限制，这是一个激烈的争论。与过去的研究相比，在新的研究基础设施（测试套件）中合并和解决措施的新颖包含将允许一个更完整和准确的图像。反过来，这对社会很重要，因为它可以极大地改变治疗或干预的目标。例如，如果语言训练能使视觉记忆受益，与语言和视觉记忆分别受到限制的情况相比，干预策略会有所不同。目前对工作记忆的评估主要集中在VWM存储容量，或语言与视觉空间记忆广度；当这些一起考虑时，VWM合并和解决不包括在内。作为当前研究成果的测试套件将克服这一限制。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).Remembering and thinking about things seen moments beforehand—termed visual working memory (VWM)—is surprisingly difficult. People continuously use their limited VWM for basic tasks like navigating a car or rapidly finding the eyeglasses they just put down. Because VWM is associated with intelligence, VWM affects academic and professional performance. VWM degrades with aging, disorders (like ADHD or schizophrenia), and brain injuries. Like a tune-up or repair of a mechanical system needs some understanding of how the system is built, an intervention to improve VWM would benefit from knowledge of the working memory system’s architecture. To gain a more full understanding of VWM’s structure and its relationships to other aspects of thinking, new research infrastructure is needed. This infrastructure will then enable future examination of how little-studied VWM capacity limits (beyond the amount of information that can be stored) are related to thinking and perception, which will in turn indicate if what is known about the well-studied VWM storage capacity generalizes to these other important limits on VWM. To enable this future examination, the present research will iteratively devise and pilot component research tasks to ultimately form an approximately 8-hour extensible suite of cognitive tests that will serve as infrastructure for the aforementioned future VWM research in healthy young adults. Moreover, this infrastructure will eventually enable further research on how VWM changes over the lifespan and in populations of disorder and/or neurological injury.To date, the vast majority of VWM research has focused on storage capacity, but neglected how information moves from visual perception into VWM (termed consolidation) and how memories for items that are near one another are kept separate (termed resolution). Consolidation determines if seen items make it into memory before being disrupted by distraction. Resolution determines whether remembering an item means that memory for additional, nearby items is less accurate. Understanding these limits is critical for generalizing from the lab to the real world, where objects and events are close to one another and distraction is frequent. This research will enable future measurement of individual differences in storage, consolidation, and resolution; other kinds of working memory; attention; and executive control using computerized tasks. These data could then be used to determine how these distinct capacity limits relate to one another. This is important to science because it is vigorously debated whether working memory should be thought of as limited by a single resource that is shared for different kinds of memory representations and processes, versus being a series of distinct systems, each with their own separate capacity limits. The novel inclusion of consolidation and resolution measures in the new research infrastructure (test suite) will allow a much more complete and accurate picture compared to past research. This, in turn, is important to society because it could greatly change how therapies or interventions are targeted. For instance, intervention strategies would be different if verbal training could benefit visual memory, compared to if verbal and visual memory were independently limited. Present evaluations of working memory typically either focus on VWM storage capacity, or on verbal versus visuospatial memory span; when these are considered together, VWM consolidation and resolution are not included. The test suite that will be the product of the present research will overcome this limitation.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.