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

不同的认知能力（即知觉、注意力、视觉短期记忆、长期记忆）的无缝整合是人类思维复杂的标志之一。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有限。******例如，视觉LTM和VSTM对表示精度有相同的限制，但不清楚是否有相同的因素影响了LTM和VSTM之间的表示精度。我的实验室通过研究记忆干扰的过程（即竞争性信息对任务相关处理的干扰），测试了与记忆准确性和可及性有关的问题。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，记忆损伤程度越高。记忆障碍有不同的形式；在干扰之后，所研究的信息可能以降低的精度保留或完全擦除。******先前的研究缺乏解决这两个选择，因为他们使用离散的，强迫选择的反应。使用混合建模的连续自由回忆任务来估计擦除和退化的单独贡献，我们发现高度不相似项目的干扰导致记忆擦除，中等相似项目的干扰导致记忆精度降低。参与者通常会抵制来自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倾向于牺牲记忆精度以支持记忆可及性，反之亦然。******我现在提出了一个新的研究项目，它将揭示认知的不同方面是如何相互联系的。我建议，关注色彩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色彩值的处理，类似于环绕抑制。在相关的工作中，我们将展示任务无关新颖性的检测将调制VSTM精度。最后，我们将使用集成统计方法来显示早期视觉皮层可以代表看不见的物体。我和我的学员将用不同的神经成像方法（如脑电图和功能磁共振成像）从行为上检验我们的假设。******这个研究项目的首要目标是确定使无缝认知成为可能的基本认知和神经过程。我们的主观体验很少突出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有相反或互补的加工偏见。我们将展示这些过程是如何相互加强或相互减弱的

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.**