Hardman Kyle O, Cowan Nelson
Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2016 May;42(5):700-22. doi: 10.1037/xlm0000197. Epub 2015 Nov 16.
Working memory (WM) is used for storing information in a highly accessible state so that other mental processes, such as reasoning, can use that information. Some WM tasks require that participants not only store information, but also reason about that information to perform optimally on the task. In this study, we used visual WM tasks that had both storage and reasoning components to determine both how ideally people are able to reason about information in WM and if there is a relationship between information storage and reasoning. We developed novel psychological process models of the tasks that allowed us to estimate for each participant both how much information they had in WM and how efficiently they reasoned about that information. Our estimates of information use showed that participants are not all ideal information users or minimal information users, but rather that there are individual differences in the thoroughness of information use in our WM tasks. However, we found that our participants tended to be more ideal than minimal. One implication of this work is that to accurately estimate the amount of information in WM, it is important to also estimate how efficiently that information is used. This new analysis contributes to the theoretical premise that human rationality may be bounded by the complexity of task demands. (PsycINFO Database Record
工作记忆（WM）用于以高度可访问的状态存储信息，以便其他心理过程，如推理，能够使用该信息。一些工作记忆任务要求参与者不仅要存储信息，还要对该信息进行推理，以便在任务中表现最佳。在本研究中，我们使用了具有存储和推理成分的视觉工作记忆任务，以确定人们在工作记忆中对信息进行推理的理想程度，以及信息存储与推理之间是否存在关系。我们开发了新颖的任务心理过程模型，使我们能够为每个参与者估计他们在工作记忆中有多少信息，以及他们对该信息进行推理的效率如何。我们对信息使用的估计表明，参与者并非都是理想的信息使用者或最少信息使用者，而是在我们的工作记忆任务中，信息使用的彻底程度存在个体差异。然而，我们发现我们的参与者倾向于更接近理想状态而非最少信息使用状态。这项工作的一个启示是，要准确估计工作记忆中的信息量，同样重要的是估计该信息的使用效率。这种新的分析有助于支持人类理性可能受到任务需求复杂性限制的理论前提。（《心理学文摘数据库记录》 ）
