Faculté de Psychologie et de Sciences de l'Education, Université de Genève, 40, bd du pont d'Arve, 1211, Genève 4, Switzerland.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2012 Feb;19(1):87-92. doi: 10.3758/s13423-011-0192-8.
Although forgetting in the short term is a ubiquitous phenomenon, its exact causes remain undecided. The aim of the present study was to test the temporal decay hypothesis according to which memory traces fade away with time when attention is diverted by concurrent activities. In two experiments involving complex span tasks, adults were asked to remember series of items (either letters or spatial locations) while verifying multiplications. The duration of processing was manipulated by presenting multiplications either in word (three × four = twelve) or digit (3 × 4 = 12) format, the former taking longer to solve, while the time available to restore memory traces after each operation was kept constant across conditions. In line with the temporal decay hypothesis, the longer solution times elicited by solving word multiplications resulted in poorer recall performance. The fact that longer processing times had a comparable effect on both verbal and visuospatial memory and that the difference between conditions remained stable from the first to the last trials makes it difficult to account for these findings by assuming that forgetting is exclusively due to representation-based interference or buildup of proactive interference.
尽管短期遗忘是一种普遍现象，但确切的原因仍未确定。本研究的目的是检验时间衰减假说，即当注意力被并发活动转移时，记忆痕迹会随着时间的推移而消失。在两项涉及复杂跨度任务的实验中，要求成年人在验证乘法的同时记住一系列项目（字母或空间位置）。通过以单词（三乘以四等于十二）或数字（3 乘以 4 等于 12）的形式呈现乘法，来操纵处理的持续时间，前者需要更长的时间来解决，而在每个操作后恢复记忆痕迹的可用时间在条件之间保持不变。与时间衰减假说一致，解决单词乘法所需的更长的解决时间导致较差的回忆表现。解决单词乘法所需的更长处理时间对言语和视空间记忆都有类似的影响，并且条件之间的差异从第一到最后一个试验都保持稳定，这使得假设遗忘仅归因于基于表示的干扰或前摄干扰的积累，很难解释这些发现。
