Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri, 217 McAlester Hall, Columbia, MO 65211, USA.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2010 Nov;36(6):1355-68. doi: 10.1037/a0020356.
We reexamine the role of time in the loss of information from working memory, the limited information accessible for cognitive tasks. The controversial issue of whether working memory deteriorates over time was investigated using arrays of unconventional visual characters. Each array was followed by a postperceptual mask, a variable retention interval (RI), and a recognition probe character. Dramatic forgetting across an unfilled RI of up to 6 s was observed. Adding a distracting task during the RI (repetition, subtraction, or parity judgment using spoken digits) lowered the level of recall but not increasingly so across RIs. Also, arrays of English letters were not forgotten during the RI unless distracting stimuli were included, in contrast to the finding for unconventional characters. The results suggest that unconventional visual items include some features inevitably lost over time. Attention-related processing, however, assists in the retention of other features and of English letters. We identify important constraints for working memory theories and propose that an equilibrium between forgetting and reactivation holds but only for elements that are not inevitably lost over time.
我们重新审视了时间在工作记忆信息损失中的作用，工作记忆是认知任务中可获取的有限信息。使用非常规视觉字符的数组来研究工作记忆是否随时间恶化的这个有争议的问题。每个数组后面都有一个后知觉掩蔽、可变的保留间隔 (RI) 和识别探针字符。在长达 6 秒的未填充 RI 中观察到明显的遗忘。在 RI 期间添加分散注意力的任务（使用口语数字进行重复、减法或奇偶性判断）会降低回忆水平，但不会随着 RI 的增加而越来越低。此外，除非包括分散注意力的刺激，否则在 RI 期间不会忘记英语字母数组，这与非常规字符的发现相反。结果表明，非常规视觉项目包含一些随着时间的推移不可避免地丢失的特征。然而，与注意力相关的处理有助于保留其他特征和英语字母。我们确定了工作记忆理论的重要约束条件，并提出遗忘和重新激活之间的平衡是存在的，但仅适用于那些不会随着时间不可避免地丢失的元素。
