McNab Fiona, Dolan Raymond J
School of Psychology, University of Birmingham.
Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2014 Jun;40(3):960-7. doi: 10.1037/a0036013. Epub 2014 Feb 10.
The effectiveness of distractor-filtering is a potentially important determinant of working memory capacity (WMC). However, a distinction between the contributions of distractor-filtering at WM encoding as opposed to filtering during maintenance has not been made and the assumption is that these rely on the same mechanism. Within 2 experiments, 1 conducted in the laboratory with 21 participants, and the other played as a game on smartphones (n = 3,247) we measure WMC without distractors, and present distractors during encoding or during the delay period of a WM task to determine performance associated with distraction at encoding and during maintenance. Despite differences in experimental setting and paradigm design between the 2 studies, we show a unique contribution to WMC from both encoding and delay distractor performance in both experiments, while controlling for performance in the absence of distraction. Thus, within 2 separate experiments, 1 involving an extremely large cohort of 3,247 participants, we show a dissociation between encoding and delay distractor-filtering, indicating that separate mechanisms may contribute to WMC.
干扰物过滤的有效性是工作记忆容量（WMC）的一个潜在重要决定因素。然而，尚未区分在工作记忆编码时的干扰物过滤与维持期间的过滤所起的作用，并且假定它们依赖于相同的机制。在两项实验中，一项在实验室中对21名参与者进行，另一项在智能手机上作为游戏进行（n = 3247），我们测量无干扰物时的工作记忆容量，并在工作记忆任务的编码期间或延迟期呈现干扰物，以确定与编码时和维持期间的干扰相关的表现。尽管两项研究在实验设置和范式设计上存在差异，但我们在两项实验中均显示，在控制无干扰情况下的表现时，编码和延迟干扰物表现对工作记忆容量均有独特贡献。因此，在两项独立实验中，其中一项涉及3247名参与者的极大型队列，我们展示了编码和延迟干扰物过滤之间的分离，表明不同机制可能对工作记忆容量有贡献。
