Bayliss Donna M, Jarrold Christopher, Baddeley Alan D, Gunn Deborah M
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol, 8 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TN, UK.
Memory. 2005 Apr-May;13(3-4):414-21. doi: 10.1080/09658210344000332.
This experiment addresses the question of what makes a working memory measure a good predictor of higher-level abilities. Verbal and visuospatial processing episodes were interleaved with distinct verbal and visuospatial storage episodes to form four complex span tasks. Although these measures were reliable predictors of reading and mathematics ability in children, they were no more predictive of these abilities than corresponding simple span tasks involving storage alone. However, when individual differences in storage ability and processing capacity were controlled for, residual variance in complex span performance was related to academic ability in some cases. These findings indicate that complex span tasks are multiply determined, and that differences in task structure can dramatically influence the relative importance of these multiple constraints and the predictive power of a complex span measure.
本实验探讨了是什么使得工作记忆测量成为高级能力的良好预测指标这一问题。言语和视觉空间加工阶段与不同的言语和视觉空间存储阶段交替进行，以形成四个复杂广度任务。尽管这些测量是儿童阅读和数学能力的可靠预测指标，但它们对这些能力的预测并不比仅涉及存储的相应简单广度任务更强。然而，当控制了存储能力和加工能力的个体差异后，复杂广度任务表现中的剩余方差在某些情况下与学业能力相关。这些发现表明，复杂广度任务是由多种因素决定的，并且任务结构的差异会极大地影响这些多重限制因素的相对重要性以及复杂广度测量的预测能力。
