Colflesh Gregory J H, Conway Andrew R A
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Chicago, Illinois 60607, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2007 Aug;14(4):699-703. doi: 10.3758/bf03196824.
The controlled attention theory of working memory suggests that individuals with greater working memory capacity (WMC) are better able to control or focus their attention than individuals with lesser WMC. This relationship has been observed in a number of selective attention paradigms including a dichotic listening task (Conway, Cowan, & Bunting, 2001) in which participants were required to shadow words presented to one ear and ignore words presented to the other ear. Conway et al. found that when the participant's name was presented to the ignored ear, 65% of participants with low WMC reported hearing their name, compared to only 20% of participants with high WMC, suggesting greater selective attention on the part of high WMC participants. In the present study, individual differences in divided attention were examined in a dichotic listening task, in which participants shadowed one message and listened for their own name in the other message. Here we find that 66.7% of high WMC and 34.5% of low WMC participants detected their name. These results suggest that as WMC capacity increases, so does the ability to control the focus of attention, with high WMC participants being able to flexibly "zoom in" or "zoom out" depending on task demands.
工作记忆的控制性注意理论表明，与工作记忆容量较小的个体相比，工作记忆容量较大的个体能够更好地控制或集中他们的注意力。这种关系在许多选择性注意范式中都有观察到，包括一项双耳分听任务（康威、考恩和邦廷，2001），在该任务中，参与者被要求跟读呈现给一只耳朵的单词，而忽略呈现给另一只耳朵的单词。康威等人发现，当参与者的名字呈现给被忽略的耳朵时，65%的低工作记忆容量参与者报告听到了自己的名字，相比之下，高工作记忆容量参与者中只有20%报告听到了，这表明高工作记忆容量参与者具有更强的选择性注意。在本研究中，在一项双耳分听任务中检验了个体在分散注意方面的差异，在该任务中，参与者跟读一条信息，同时在另一条信息中聆听自己的名字。我们发现，66.7%的高工作记忆容量参与者和34.5%的低工作记忆容量参与者检测到了自己的名字。这些结果表明，随着工作记忆容量的增加，控制注意力焦点的能力也会增强，高工作记忆容量参与者能够根据任务需求灵活地“放大”或“缩小”注意力。
