School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Western Australia, Australia.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2010 Jul;36(4):958-78. doi: 10.1037/a0019764.
We investigated the effects of the duration and type of to-be-articulated distractors during encoding of a verbal list into short-term memory (STM). Distractors and to-be-remembered items alternated during list presentation, as in the complex-span task that underlies much of working-memory research. According to an interference model of STM, known as serial order in a box (SOB; Farrell & Lewandowsky, 2002), additional repeated articulations of the same word between list items should cause minimal further disruption of encoding into STM even though the retention interval for early list items is increased. SOB also predicts that the articulation of several different distractor items should lead to much enhanced disruption if the distractor interval is increased. Those predictions were qualitatively confirmed in 4 experiments that found that it is the type of distractors, not their total duration, that determines the success of encoding a list into STM. The results pose a challenge to temporal models of complex-span performance, such as the time-based resource sharing model (Barrouillet, Bernardin, & Camos, 2004). The results add to a growing body of evidence that memory for the short term is not exclusively governed by purely temporal processes.
我们研究了在将口头列表编码到短期记忆 (STM) 时，要发音的干扰项的持续时间和类型的影响。在列表呈现期间，干扰项和要记住的项目交替出现，就像在工作记忆研究中基础的复杂跨度任务一样。根据 STM 的干扰模型，称为盒中顺序 (SOB; Farrell & Lewandowsky, 2002)，即使早期列表项的保留间隔增加，在列表项之间对同一单词进行额外的重复发音也应该不会对 STM 中的编码造成进一步的破坏。SOB 还预测，如果增加干扰项间隔，多个不同干扰项的发音应该会导致更大的干扰。这四个实验定性地证实了这些预测，这些实验发现，决定将列表成功编码到 STM 中的是干扰项的类型，而不是它们的总持续时间。这些结果对复杂跨度性能的时间模型（例如基于时间的资源共享模型 (Barrouillet, Bernardin, & Camos, 2004)）提出了挑战。这些结果增加了越来越多的证据表明，短期记忆不仅仅由纯粹的时间过程控制。
