Informational Representation Separated From Visual Images In Sensory Memory

Sensory memory is a memory module of the initial stages in human cognitive system.It stores a large amount of information for a brief time to facilitate further selective processing.As a core issue of visual research,the representation of visual sensory memory has received considerable interests.Currently,the view of mainstream believes that visual sensory memory is like a snapshot of the physical world,just like an icon.However,sensory memory,as a buffer before information selection,facilitates the subsequent information selection,while information selecting depends not only on its visible features,but also on the intrinsic meaning which separates from visual features.Based on this,we put forward the hypothesis that there might be an abstract representation in the visual sensory memory that is separate from the visual features.This study combines the of the part-report technique and the masking technique to verify the above hypotheses.In this study,we constructed target stimuli and masking stimuli with similar meaning information but different visual features,and we measured the performance of participants in different masking conditions.By comparing the performance in different conditions,we could observe the representation conflicts between target and mask.The main logic is as below:if the mask with similar meaning comparing to the mask with unsimilar meaning leads to a greater decrease in the memory recall of the target stimulus,it indicates that the meaning information of the mask and the target have similar representations in the visual sensory memory and cause conflict.The mask and the target have only intrinsic meaning in similarity,therefore,it can be inferred that there is a semantic representation in the visual sensory memory that is separated from the visual image.The study consists of three parts including a total of eight experiments.In Experiments 1 to 3,we first used the classical study with Arabic numerals as the target stimulus,and employed the Chinese-digits in capital form as masking stimuli who have similar semantic information with target but different visual features;Experiment 4 to Experiment 6 employed the orientation feature that is generally considered to be closely related to the visual features,and used the arrow as the target stimulus to examine the influence of masking stimuli with orientation information on the memory performance.In Experiment 7 and Experiment 8 we dislocated the mask stimulus in Experiment 2.a and Experiment 5 to investigate the role of spatial location in the representation of visual sensory memory.Kang,M.-S.,Hong,S.W.,Blake,R.,&Woodman,G.(201 1).Visual workingThe study has the following conclusions:1)For the semantic information that needs to be extracted from top to bottom,comparing to the mask with different visual features and semantics,the mask with different visual features but similar semantics has more damage to the memory performance,indicating that there is a representation of semantic information in visual sensory memory separated from visual image.2)For the orientation information extracted from the bottom-up processing,comparing to the mask with different visual features and with no orientation information,the mask with different visual images but similar orientation information has more damage to the memory performance,indicating that there is a representation of the orientation information separated from the visual image in visual sensory memory.3)The specific visual features of masking and the meaning information of masking both affect memory recall,indicating that the representation of visual sensory memory is multi-component,and snapshot representation and informational representation coexist.4)When the spatial position of the mask and the target is misaligned,the degree of specific damage to the memory performance is related to the type of meaning information.The semantic information extracted from the top down is more dependent on the spatial position,compared to orientation information which is extracted from down top.The dependence of the meaning information on the spatial position is positively correlated with the degree of abstraction.The above results reveal the existence of informational representations in visual sensory memory,providing evidence for multi-component representation of sensory memory.This could also provide guidance for the design and use of masking stimuli in visual research.At the same time.the conclusions of the study can also achieve application value in the fields of interaction design and interface design.