Mercer Tom, McKeown Denis
Institute of Psychological Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, England.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2010 Nov;72(8):2289-303. doi: 10.3758/bf03196702.
Previous research has demonstrated a potent, stimulus-specific form of interference in short-term auditory memory. This effect has been interpreted in terms of interitem confusion and grouping, but the present experiments suggested that interference might be a feature-specific phenomenon. Participants compared standard and comparison tones over a 10-sec interval and were required to determine whether they differed in timbre. A single interfering distractor tone was presented either 50 msec or 8 sec after the offset of the standard (Experiment 1) or 2 sec prior to its onset (Experiment 2). The distractor varied in the number of features it shared with the standard and comparison, and this proved critical, since performance on the task was greatly impaired when the distractor either consisted of novel, unshared features (Experiment 1) or contained the distinguishing feature of the comparison tone (Experiments 1 and 2). These findings were incompatible with earlier accounts of forgetting but were fully explicable by the recent timbre memory model, which associates interference in short-term auditory memory with an "updating" process and feature overwriting. These results suggest similarities with the mechanisms that underlie forgetting in verbal short-term memory.
先前的研究已经证明，在短期听觉记忆中存在一种强大的、刺激特异性的干扰形式。这种效应已根据项目间的混淆和分组来解释，但目前的实验表明，干扰可能是一种特征特异性现象。参与者在10秒的时间间隔内比较标准音和比较音，并被要求确定它们在音色上是否不同。在标准音消失后50毫秒或8秒（实验1）或在其出现前2秒（实验2）呈现单个干扰分心音。分心音与标准音和比较音共享的特征数量不同，这一点被证明至关重要，因为当分心音要么由新颖的、不共享的特征组成（实验1），要么包含比较音的区别特征时（实验1和2），任务表现会受到极大损害。这些发现与早期关于遗忘的解释不一致，但最近的音色记忆模型能够完全解释这些发现，该模型将短期听觉记忆中的干扰与“更新”过程和特征覆盖联系起来。这些结果表明，与言语短期记忆中遗忘的潜在机制存在相似之处。
