Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37240-7817, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2013 Apr;20(2):348-55. doi: 10.3758/s13423-012-0354-3.
Recent research using change-detection tasks has shown that a directed-forgetting cue, indicating that a subset of the information stored in memory can be forgotten, significantly benefits the other information stored in visual working memory. How do these directed-forgetting cues aid the memory representations that are retained? We addressed this question in the present study by using a recall paradigm to measure the nature of the retained memory representations. Our results demonstrated that a directed-forgetting cue leads to higher-fidelity representations of the remaining items and a lower probability of dropping these representations from memory. Next, we showed that this is made possible by the to-be-forgotten item being expelled from visual working memory following the cue, allowing maintenance mechanisms to be focused on only the items that remain in visual working memory. Thus, the present findings show that cues to forget benefit the remaining information in visual working memory by fundamentally improving their quality relative to conditions in which just as many items are encoded but no cue is provided.
最近使用变化检测任务的研究表明，定向遗忘提示（表明记忆中存储的信息的一部分可以被遗忘）显著有益于保留在视觉工作记忆中的其他信息。这些定向遗忘提示如何帮助保留的记忆表示？在本研究中，我们使用回忆范式来测量保留的记忆表示的性质来解决这个问题。我们的结果表明，定向遗忘提示导致剩余项目的更高保真度表示，并且从记忆中丢弃这些表示的可能性降低。接下来，我们表明，这是通过在提示后将待遗忘的项目从视觉工作记忆中驱逐出来而成为可能的，从而使维持机制仅集中在保留在视觉工作记忆中的项目上。因此，目前的研究结果表明，遗忘提示通过从根本上提高剩余信息的质量来有益于视觉工作记忆中的剩余信息，与编码相同数量的项目但没有提示的情况相比。
