1Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University.
Psychol Sci. 2013 Sep;24(9):1854-9. doi: 10.1177/0956797613479610. Epub 2013 Jul 17.
The ability to maintain the serial order of events is recognized as a major function of working memory. Although general models of working memory postulate a close link between working memory and attention, such a link has so far not been proposed specifically for serial-order working memory. The present study provided the first empirical demonstration of a direct link between serial order in verbal working memory and spatial selective attention. We show that the retrieval of later items of a sequence stored in working memory-compared with that of earlier items-produces covert attentional shifts toward the right. This observation suggests the conceptually surprising notion that serial-order working memory, even for nonspatially defined verbal items, draws on spatial attention.
保持事件序列顺序的能力被认为是工作记忆的主要功能之一。尽管工作记忆的一般模型假设工作记忆和注意力之间存在密切联系，但到目前为止，还没有专门针对序列顺序工作记忆提出这种联系。本研究首次提供了言语工作记忆中序列顺序与空间选择性注意之间直接联系的实证证据。我们表明，与早期项目相比，从工作记忆中检索序列中的后期项目会导致对右侧的隐蔽注意力转移。这一观察结果表明了一个概念上令人惊讶的观点，即即使对于非空间定义的言语项目，序列顺序工作记忆也依赖于空间注意力。
