Fougnie Daryl, Marois René
Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, 627 Wilson Hall, 111 21st Ave S., Nashville, TN 37203, USA.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2009 Nov;71(8):1831-41. doi: 10.3758/APP.71.8.1831.
The concurrent maintenance of two visual working memory (VWM) arrays can lead to profound interference. It is unclear, however, whether these costs arise from limitations in VWM storage capacity (Fougnie & Marois, 2006) or from interference between the storage of one visual array and encoding or retrieval of another visual array (Cowan & Morey, 2007). Here, we show that encoding a VWM array does not interfere with maintenance of another VWM array unless the two displays exceed maintenance capacity (Experiments 1 and 2). Moreover, manipulating the extent to which encoding and maintenance can interfere with one another had no discernable effect on dual-task performance (Experiment 2). Finally, maintenance of a VWM array was not affected by retrieval of information from another VWM array (Experiment 3). Taken together, these findings demonstrate that dual-task interference between two concurrent VWM tasks is due to a capacity-limited store that is independent from encoding and retrieval processes.
同时维持两个视觉工作记忆（VWM）阵列会导致严重的干扰。然而，目前尚不清楚这些代价是源于VWM存储容量的限制（Fougnie和Marois，2006），还是源于一个视觉阵列的存储与另一个视觉阵列的编码或检索之间的干扰（Cowan和Morey，2007）。在这里，我们表明，除非两个显示超出维持容量，否则编码一个VWM阵列不会干扰另一个VWM阵列的维持（实验1和2）。此外，操纵编码和维持相互干扰的程度对双任务表现没有明显影响（实验2）。最后，一个VWM阵列的维持不受从另一个VWM阵列检索信息的影响（实验3）。综上所述，这些发现表明，两个并发VWM任务之间的双任务干扰是由于一个独立于编码和检索过程的容量受限存储造成的。
