Souza Alessandra S, Rerko Laura, Oberauer Klaus
Department of Psychology, University of Zurich.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2014 Jun;40(3):1237-56. doi: 10.1037/a0036331. Epub 2014 Apr 14.
During the retention interval of a working memory task, presenting a retro-cue directs attention to 1 of the items in working memory. Testing the cued item leads to faster and more accurate responses. We contrasted 5 explanations of this benefit: (a) removal of noncued items, (b) strengthening of the cued item, (c) protection from probe interference, (d) protection from degradation, and (e) prioritization during the decision process. Experiment 1 showed that retro-cues reduced the set size effect in a visual recognition task, and did so increasingly with more time available to use the retro-cue. This finding is predicted only by Hypotheses 1 and 2. Hypotheses 3 through 5 were ruled out as explanations of the retro-cue benefit in this experiment. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants encoded 2 sequentially presented memory sets. In half of the trials, 1 item from the first set was retro-cued during the interset interval. Retro-cues improved memory for the second set. This reloading benefit is predicted only by the removal hypothesis: Irrelevant contents are removed from working memory, freeing capacity to encode new contents. Experiment 3 also yielded evidence that strengthening of the cued item might contribute to the retro-cue effect.
在工作记忆任务的保持间隔期间，呈现一个回溯线索会将注意力导向工作记忆中的一个项目。对被线索提示的项目进行测试会带来更快且更准确的反应。我们对比了对此种益处的5种解释：(a) 去除未被线索提示的项目，(b) 增强被线索提示的项目，(c) 免受探测干扰，(d) 免受衰退影响，以及 (e) 在决策过程中进行优先级排序。实验1表明，回溯线索在视觉识别任务中减少了集合大小效应，并且随着有更多时间可用于利用回溯线索，这种效应愈发明显。这一发现仅由假设1和假设2预测得出。假设3至假设5作为该实验中回溯线索益处的解释被排除。在实验2和实验3中，参与者对两个相继呈现的记忆集合进行编码。在一半的试验中，在集合间隔期间对第一个集合中的一个项目进行回溯线索提示。回溯线索提高了对第二个集合的记忆。这种重新加载益处仅由去除假设预测得出：无关内容从工作记忆中被去除，从而腾出容量来编码新内容。实验3还得出证据表明，被线索提示项目的增强可能对回溯线索效应有贡献。
