Lewandowsky Stephan, Oberauer Klaus
School of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol.
Department of Psychology, University of Zurich.
Psychol Rev. 2015 Oct;122(4):674-99. doi: 10.1037/a0039684.
We examine the explanatory roles that have been ascribed to various forms of rehearsal or refreshing in short-term memory (STM) and working memory paradigms, usually in conjunction with the assumption that memories decay over time if they are not rehearsed. Notwithstanding the popularity of the rehearsal notion, there have been few detailed examinations of its underlying mechanisms. We explicitly implemented rehearsal in a decay model and explored its role by simulation in several benchmark paradigms ranging from immediate serial recall to complex span and delayed recall. The results show that articulatory forms of rehearsal often fail to counteract temporal decay. Rapid attentional refreshing performs considerably better, but so far there is scant empirical evidence that people engage in refreshing during STM tasks. Combining articulatory rehearsal and refreshing as 2 independent maintenance processes running in parallel leads to worse performance than refreshing alone. We conclude that theoretical reliance on articulatory rehearsal as a causative agent in memory may be unwise and that explanatory appeals to rehearsal are insufficient unless buttressed by quantitative modeling.
我们研究了在短期记忆（STM）和工作记忆范式中，各种形式的复述或刷新所具有的解释作用，通常这还伴随着一种假设，即记忆如果不进行复述，会随着时间衰减。尽管复述概念很流行，但对其潜在机制却鲜有详细研究。我们在一个衰减模型中明确实现了复述，并通过模拟在从即时系列回忆到复杂广度和延迟回忆等几个基准范式中探究了其作用。结果表明，言语形式的复述往往无法抵消时间衰减。快速注意刷新的表现要好得多，但到目前为止，几乎没有实证证据表明人们在STM任务中会进行刷新。将言语复述和刷新作为两个并行运行的独立维持过程相结合，会导致比单独进行刷新更差的表现。我们得出结论，在记忆中理论上依赖言语复述作为一种成因可能是不明智的，而且除非有定量建模的支持，否则对复述的解释性诉求是不够的。
