Massive Effects of Saliency on Information Processing in Visual Working Memory

Limitations in the ability to temporarily represent information in visual working memory (VWM) are crucial for (visual) cognition. Whether VWM processing is dependent on an object’s saliency (i.e., how much it stands out) has been neglected in VWM research. Therefore, we developed a novel VWM task design that allows direct control over saliency. In three experiments with this task (on 10, 31, and 60 healthy adults, respectively), we consistently find that VWM performance is strongly and parametrically influenced by saliency and that both an object’s relative (to concurrently presented objects) and absolute saliency influence VWM processing. We also demonstrate that this effect is indeed due to bottom-up saliency, rather than differential fit between each object and the top-down attentional set. A simple computational model assuming that VWM performance is determined by the weighted sum of absolute and relative saliency accounts well for the observed data patterns.

视觉工作记忆（VWM）在暂时表征信息方面的局限性对于（视觉）认知至关重要。VWM处理是否依赖于对象的显著性（即其突出程度）在VWM研究中一直被忽视。因此，我们开发了一种新型的VWM任务设计，该设计能够直接控制显著性。在三项使用该任务进行的实验中（分别针对10名、31名和60名健康成年人），我们一致发现VWM表现受到显著性和参数化的强烈影响，并且对象的相对显著性（相对于同时呈现的对象）和绝对显著性均对VWM处理产生影响。我们还证明，这种效应确实源于自下而上的显著性，而非每个对象与自上而下的注意力集之间的差异匹配。一个简单的假设VWM表现由绝对和相对显著性的加权总和决定的计算模型，很好地解释了观察到的数据模式。