情景线索在视-触跨通道搜索任务中的作用机制

We experience and understand the external world by processing, learning and effortless selecting the most relevant information from the numerous available possibilities collected by multiple senses. During this selective attention process (Wolfe, 2003), the learning of repeated spatial regularities in the environment is crucial important to guide our perception, action and boost an efficient search performance，an effect named as contextual cueing (Goujon, Didierjean, & Thorpe, 2015). Although many researches (including my PhD thesis) on contextual cueing have been done in the visual modality, some basic questions concerning both visual and tactile modality as well as cross-modal effects of contextual cueing remain unanswered. These issues are important because different senses (tactile versus visual) contribute to spatial memory and these sensory modalities differ as concerns their reliability and reference frames. Therefore, it would be highly interesting to investigate how does different modalities works in contextual cueing and how do they compete and cooperate with each other. To examine these issues, the proposed project with two working packages will investigate visual and tactile contextual cueing in multimodal search. By using revised contextual cueing paradigm, we will address the following questions: 1) what type of memory (position-specific and / or relational memory) supports the learning of tactile contextual associations? 2) How can the underlying contextual memory representation across different sensory modalities (e.g., visual and tactile) be characterized (modality-specific and / or supramodal)?

选择性注意机制能使人类个体从复杂的多感觉通道信息中高效地搜寻重要信息同时忽略次要信息。在这个过程中，情景线索效应，即通过学习环境中重复的情景信息提升搜索效率的现象，扮演着重要的作用。然而，目前该领域的研究以视觉为主，很少关注触觉或跨通道情景信息。由于空间线索可由多通道信息组成，且不同通道的信息在稳定性、参考坐标等方面均存在差异，所以关于多通道情景信息的研究对深入了解情景线索效应的内在加工机制至关重要。本项目拟采用触觉或视-触觉搜索任务，从以下几个方面深入探讨情景线索效应：1）触觉情景线索记忆的参考机制；2）全局和局部触觉信息在情景线索效应中的作用；3）情景线索的跨通道学习/迁移效应，以及4）检验多通道情景线索效应的内在加工机制是否一致。

情景线索效应指的是人类能够学习重复不变的情景信息并加快在相应场景中反应速度的现象。前期研究主要集中于视觉通道，而本项目将情景线索效应研究拓展到触觉以及视-触觉跨通道领域。目前已经发表了标注本项目资助、并且与本项目研究内容相关的SCI论文共3篇，CSSCI核心期刊论文1篇，已经投稿或者正在成稿的论文2篇，已公开实用新型专利1篇。本项目研究发现呈现在触觉通道的空间情景线索也是可以被学习的，且触觉空间情景线索的学习是以人体而非环境为参考机制的：例如无论被试双手放置位置如何变化（如平行/交叉放置，掌心朝上/朝下），只要触觉信息随着双手的变化而在相应的手指上保持不变（例如靶刺激总是呈现在左手食指上），所习得的情景线索效应即可迁移。与之相对，视觉情景线索效应则能够以视觉场景中较大的背景物体为参考机制（即一定程度上以环境为中心）。此外，基于触觉信息所习得的情景线索效应可以迁移到视觉通道，但基于视觉信息所学习的空间情景记忆不能迁移到触觉通道。这些研究结果表明不同感觉通道的情景线索学习特征与参考机制存在不同，为了解情景线索效应内在加工机制提供了新的且非常重要的实验证据。