Queensland Brain Institute and School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia.
PLoS One. 2011;6(5):e19707. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0019707. Epub 2011 May 24.
The goal of the present study was to examine the extent to which working memory supports the maintenance of object locations during active spatial navigation. Participants were required to navigate a virtual environment and to encode the location of a target object. In the subsequent maintenance period they performed one of three secondary tasks that were designed to selectively load visual, verbal or spatial working memory subsystems. Thereafter participants re-entered the environment and navigated back to the remembered location of the target. We found that while navigation performance in participants with high navigational ability was impaired only by the spatial secondary task, navigation performance in participants with poor navigational ability was impaired equally by spatial and verbal secondary tasks. The visual secondary task had no effect on navigation performance. Our results extend current knowledge by showing that the differential engagement of working memory subsystems is determined by navigational ability.
本研究的目的是考察工作记忆在主动空间导航过程中对目标位置保持的支持程度。参与者被要求在虚拟环境中导航，并对目标物体的位置进行编码。在随后的维持阶段，他们执行了三个次要任务中的一个，这些任务旨在有选择地加载视觉、言语或空间工作记忆子系统。之后，参与者重新进入环境并导航回到目标的记忆位置。我们发现，虽然高导航能力的参与者的导航表现仅受到空间次要任务的影响，但导航能力差的参与者的导航表现同样受到空间和言语次要任务的影响。视觉次要任务对导航表现没有影响。我们的结果通过显示工作记忆子系统的不同参与取决于导航能力，扩展了当前的知识。
