Artuso Caterina, Palladino Paola
Brain Behavioral Science Department, University of Pavia, Piazza Botta 11, 27100, Pavia, Italy.
Cogn Process. 2016 Feb;17(1):49-57. doi: 10.1007/s10339-015-0735-4. Epub 2015 Sep 1.
The aim of the present study was to investigate how working memory updating for verbal material is modulated by enduring properties of long-term memory. Two coexisting perspectives that account for the relation between long-term representation and short-term performance were addressed. First, evidence suggests that performance is more closely linked to lexical properties, that is, co-occurrences within the language. Conversely, other evidence suggests that performance is linked more to long-term representations which do not entail lexical/linguistic representations. Our aim was to investigate how these two kinds of long-term memory associations (i.e., lexical or nonlexical) modulate ongoing working memory activity. Therefore, we manipulated (between participants) the strength of the association in letters based on either frequency of co-occurrences (lexical) or contiguity along the sequence of the alphabet (nonlexical). Results showed a cost in working memory updating for strongly lexically associated stimuli only. Our findings advance knowledge of how lexical long-term memory associations between consonants affect working memory updating and, in turn, contribute to the study of factors which impact the updating process across memory systems.
本研究的目的是调查长期记忆的持久特性如何调节言语材料的工作记忆更新。探讨了两种共存的观点，它们解释了长期表征与短期表现之间的关系。首先，有证据表明，表现与词汇特性（即语言中的共现）联系更为紧密。相反，其他证据表明，表现与不涉及词汇/语言表征的长期表征联系更为紧密。我们的目的是研究这两种长期记忆关联（即词汇或非词汇）如何调节正在进行的工作记忆活动。因此，我们（在参与者之间）根据共现频率（词汇）或字母表序列中的相邻性（非词汇）来操纵字母关联的强度。结果表明，只有在词汇关联强烈的刺激下，工作记忆更新才会出现代价。我们的研究结果推进了关于辅音之间的词汇长期记忆关联如何影响工作记忆更新的知识，进而有助于研究影响跨记忆系统更新过程的因素。
