Postle Bradley R, Desposito Mark, Corkin Suzanne
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin, 1202 West Johnson St., Madison, WI 53726, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2005 Mar;33(2):203-12. doi: 10.3758/bf03195309.
We tested the hypothesis that a verbal coding mechanism is necessarily engaged by object, but not spatial, visual working memory tasks. We employed a dual-task procedure that paired n-back working memory tasks with domain-specific distractor trials inserted into each interstimulus interval of the n-back tasks. In two experiments, object n-back performance demonstrated greater sensitivity to verbal distraction, whereas spatial n-back performance demonstrated greater sensitivity to motion distraction. Visual object and spatial working memory may differ fundamentally in that the mnemonic representation of featural characteristics of objects incorporates a verbal (perhaps semantic) code, whereas the mnemonic representation of the location of objects does not. Thus, the processes supporting working memory for these two types of information may differ in more ways than those dictated by the "what/where" organization of the visual system, a fact more easily reconciled with a component process than a memory systems account of working memory function.
言语编码机制必然参与客体视觉工作记忆任务，而非空间视觉工作记忆任务。我们采用了一种双任务程序，将n-back工作记忆任务与特定领域的干扰试验配对，这些干扰试验插入到n-back任务的每个刺激间隔中。在两个实验中，客体n-back任务的表现对言语干扰更敏感，而空间n-back任务的表现对运动干扰更敏感。视觉客体和空间工作记忆可能在根本上存在差异，因为客体特征的记忆表征包含言语（可能是语义）编码，而客体位置的记忆表征则不包含。因此，支持这两种信息工作记忆的过程可能在更多方面存在差异，而不仅仅是视觉系统“什么/哪里”组织所决定的那些方面。这一事实与工作记忆功能的成分过程解释比记忆系统解释更容易协调一致。
