Ball B Hunter, Knight Justin B, Dewitt Michael R, Brewer Gene A
a Department of Psychology , Arizona State University , Tempe , AZ , USA.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2013;66(12):2411-25. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2013.785576. Epub 2013 May 16.
Working memory processes play a critical role in actively maintaining, rehearsing, and retrieving goal-relevant information during cognitively engaging tasks. In the current study, we examined individual differences in prospective memory between young adults with high versus low working memory capacity (WMC) when they had to momentarily delay their intentions for either 6 or 42 s. In Experiments 1 and 2, high-WMC individuals performed significantly better at both delay intervals than did low-WMC individuals under standard ongoing task conditions. In Experiment 2, we included an interrupting task during the longer delay that decreased performance in the low-WMC relative to the high-WMC individuals. These results suggest that prospective memory performance is generally impaired across all retention intervals in low-WMC individuals, and that high-WMC individuals may be better able to retrieve the intention from long-term memory even when attention is interrupted by intervening activities.
在认知参与任务期间，工作记忆过程在积极维持、复述和检索与目标相关的信息方面发挥着关键作用。在当前的研究中，我们考察了工作记忆容量（WMC）高与低的年轻成年人在必须暂时延迟其意图6秒或42秒时，前瞻记忆的个体差异。在实验1和实验2中，在标准的持续任务条件下，高WMC个体在两个延迟间隔下的表现均显著优于低WMC个体。在实验2中，我们在较长延迟期间纳入了一项干扰任务，相对于高WMC个体，该任务降低了低WMC个体的表现。这些结果表明，低WMC个体在前瞻记忆表现上在所有保持间隔内通常都会受损，并且高WMC个体即使在注意力被中间活动打断时，可能也更有能力从长期记忆中检索意图。
