Han Sang-Hoon, Kim Min-Shik
Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea.
Psychol Sci. 2004 Sep;15(9):623-8. doi: 10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00730.x.
Working memory (WM) has been thought to include not only short-term memory stores but also executive processes that operate on the contents of memory. The present study examined the involvement of WM in search using a dual-task paradigm in which participants performed visual search while manipulating or simply maintaining information held in WM. Experiments 1a and 2a involved executive WM tasks that required counting backward from a target digit and sorting a string of letters alphabetically, respectively. In both experiments, the search slopes in the dual-task condition were significantly steeper than those in a search-alone condition, indicating that performing the WM manipulation tasks influenced the efficiency of visual search. In contrast, when information was simply maintained in WM (Experiments 1b and 2b), search slopes did not differ between the single- and dual-task conditions. These results suggest that WM resources related to executive functions may be required in visual search.
工作记忆（WM）不仅被认为包括短期记忆存储，还包括对记忆内容进行操作的执行过程。本研究使用双任务范式考察了工作记忆在搜索中的参与情况，在该范式中，参与者在操作或简单维持工作记忆中保存的信息的同时进行视觉搜索。实验1a和2a涉及执行性工作记忆任务，分别要求从目标数字开始倒数以及按字母顺序对一串字母进行排序。在这两个实验中，双任务条件下的搜索斜率显著陡于单独搜索条件下的斜率，这表明执行工作记忆操作任务会影响视觉搜索的效率。相比之下，当信息仅在工作记忆中维持时（实验1b和2b），单任务和双任务条件下的搜索斜率没有差异。这些结果表明，视觉搜索可能需要与执行功能相关的工作记忆资源。
