The extent of center-surround inhibition for colored items in working memory
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The extent of center-surround inhibition for colored items in working memory Rui Shi 1 & Heming Gao 1 & Qi Zhang 1 Accepted: 4 November 2020 # The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Remembering a color suppresses the representations of similar colors, but not of distinct colors, producing a center-surround inhibition (CSI) to resolve the competition between similar colors. In this study, three probe experiments were conducted to investigate the extent of CSI for colored items in working memory (WM). In Experiments 1 and 2, two WM items (distance 0°, 20°, 40°, or 60° in color space) were presented sequentially, one of which was cued to compare with the probe (matched or nonmatched). The probe distance between the non-matched probe (NP) and cued WM item was 30° in Experiment 1 and 30°, 60°, or 90° in Experiment 2. Results for matched probe (MP) revealed that two WM items might produce a maximal CSI at distance 20°, and fall outside each other’s inhibitory surround at distance 40°. However, the CSI was not found in the NP conditions (i.e., distance 30°, 60°, or 90°) in both Experiments 1 and 2, suggesting that the NP might be unsuitable for investigating the CSI in WM. In Experiment 3, participants were asked to discriminate which WM item was matched with the probe (no NP conditions). RTs were slowest at distance 20°, but were almost equal across distance 30°, 40°, 50°, or 60°. These results demonstrated that two WM items might produce a maximal CSI at distance 20°, and begin to fall outside each other’s inhibitory surround at distance 30°. Keywords center-surround inhibition . working memory . inhibitory surround
Attending to a specific feature (e.g., color, orientation, motion direction) inhibits the processing of similar but not distinct features in feature space. This is called the center-surround inhibition (CSI) in feature-based attention (Loach, Frischen, Bruce, & Tsotsos, 2008; Störmer & Alvarez, 2014; Tombu & Tsotsos, 2008). According to the CSI, the discrimination performance between two features exhibits a U-shaped curve with increasing feature distance, with the best performance for two identical or distinct features, and with the worst performance for two similar features.
* Heming Gao [email protected] * Qi Zhang [email protected] 1
School of Psychology, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian 116029, China
Extent of CSI in attention Color has been extensively studied in CSI research for its effective guidance of attention (Bartsch et al., 2017; Fang, Becker, & Liu, 2019; Störmer & Alvarez, 2014; Wang, Miller, & Liu, 2015). Störmer and Alvarez (2014) presented two visual fields with randomly moving dots. In each field, there were two sets of colored dots: One color was indicated as a target and the other served as a distractor. Color distance between two targets was specified by angular distance (i.e., 0° ~ 60°) on a color wheel defined in the CIELAB color space (Commission Internationale de l’Eclairage, 1978). This color wheel was used in several studies (Fang, Becker, et al., 2019; Wang et al., 201
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