Cocenas-Silva Raquel, Bueno José Lino Oliveira, Doyère Valérie, Droit-Volet Sylvie
a University of São Paulo , Ribeirão Preto , Brazil.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2014;67(7):1401-14. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2013.863375. Epub 2014 Mar 11.
Humans and animals encode and store in memory elapsed intervals as evidenced through their temporal expectancies. However, there are very few experimental studies on long-term memory of duration. The aim of this original study was to examine the consolidation process for duration and its effect on time judgement. In our study, memory of duration was tested in humans with a temporal generalization task. Consolidation was assessed by means of a 15-min nontemporal interference task introduced at different delays after the initial learning of a 4-s standard duration. The results showed that (a) when tested 24 hours after the learning phase, memory of the 4-s duration was disrupted (less precision and lengthening effect) if the interference task was introduced 30-45 min after learning; (b) no disruption was observed when memory was tested immediately after the interference task; and (c) there was a temporal gradient of the disruptive interference effect within the first hour after learning. Overall, these results fulfil the key criteria for the inference of a synaptic/cellular consolidation process and thus demonstrate that, as is the case for other memories, memory of duration undergoes a consolidation process that lasts at least one hour.
人类和动物会对经过的时间间隔进行编码并存储在记忆中，这一点可通过它们的时间预期得到证明。然而，关于时长的长期记忆的实验研究非常少。这项原创研究的目的是检验时长的巩固过程及其对时间判断的影响。在我们的研究中，通过时间泛化任务对人类的时长记忆进行了测试。巩固过程是通过在最初学习4秒标准时长后不同延迟时间引入的15分钟非时间干扰任务来评估的。结果表明：(a) 在学习阶段24小时后进行测试时，如果在学习后30 - 45分钟引入干扰任务，4秒时长的记忆会受到干扰（精度降低和延长效应）；(b) 在干扰任务后立即进行记忆测试时，未观察到干扰现象；(c) 在学习后的第一个小时内，干扰效应存在时间梯度。总体而言，这些结果满足了推断突触/细胞巩固过程的关键标准，因此表明，与其他记忆一样，时长记忆会经历至少持续一小时的巩固过程。
