Seemüller Anna, Fiehler Katja, Rösler Frank
Philipps-University Marburg, Germany.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2011 Jan;136(1):52-9. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2010.09.014. Epub 2010 Oct 20.
The present study investigated whether visual and kinesthetic stimuli are stored as multisensory or modality-specific representations in unimodal and crossmodal working memory tasks. To this end, angle-shaped movement trajectories were presented to 16 subjects in delayed matching-to-sample tasks either visually or kinesthetically during encoding and recognition. During the retention interval, a secondary visual or kinesthetic interference task was inserted either immediately or with a delay after encoding. The modality of the interference task interacted significantly with the encoding modality. After visual encoding, memory was more impaired by a visual than by a kinesthetic secondary task, while after kinesthetic encoding the pattern was reversed. The time when the secondary task had to be performed interacted with the encoding modality as well. For visual encoding, memory was more impaired, when the secondary task had to be performed at the beginning of the retention interval. In contrast, memory after kinesthetic encoding was more affected, when the secondary task was introduced later in the retention interval. The findings suggest that working memory traces are maintained in a modality-specific format characterized by distinct consolidation processes that take longer after kinesthetic than after visual encoding.
本研究调查了在单峰和跨峰工作记忆任务中，视觉和动觉刺激是否作为多感官或特定模态表征存储。为此，在延迟样本匹配任务中，向16名受试者呈现角形运动轨迹，在编码和识别过程中，通过视觉或动觉方式呈现。在保持间隔期间，在编码后立即或延迟插入一个次级视觉或动觉干扰任务。干扰任务的模态与编码模态有显著交互作用。视觉编码后，视觉次级任务比动觉次级任务对记忆的损害更大，而动觉编码后，模式则相反。次级任务必须执行的时间也与编码模态有交互作用。对于视觉编码，当次级任务必须在保持间隔开始时执行时，记忆受到的损害更大。相比之下，当次级任务在保持间隔后期引入时，动觉编码后的记忆受到的影响更大。研究结果表明，工作记忆痕迹以特定模态的形式维持，其特征是不同的巩固过程，动觉编码后的巩固过程比视觉编码后花费的时间更长。
