Garcia Andrew C, Bhangal Sabrina, Velasquez Anthony G, Geisler Mark W, Morsella Ezequiel
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Delaware Newark, DE, USA.
Department of Psychology, San Francisco State University San Francisco, CA, USA.
Front Psychol. 2016 Jun 21;7:927. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00927. eCollection 2016.
Investigators have begun to examine the fleeting urges and inclinations that subjects experience when performing tasks involving response interference and working memory. Building on this research, we developed a paradigm in which subjects, after learning to press certain buttons when presented with certain letters, are presented with two action-related letters (the memoranda) but must withhold responding (4 s) until cued to emit the response associated with only one of the two letters. In the Congruent condition, the action corresponds to the cue (e.g., memoranda = AB, cue = B, response = B); in the Incongruent condition, the action corresponds to the other item of the memoranda (e.g., memoranda = AB, cue = B, response = A). After each trial, subjects inputted a rating regarding their subjectively experienced "urge to err" on that trial. These introspection-based data revealed that, as found in previous research, urges to err were strongest for incongruent trials. Our findings reveal, first, that subjects can successfully perform this new task, even though it is more complex than that of previous studies, and second, that, in this new paradigm, reliable subjective, metacognitive data can be obtained on a trial-by-trial basis. We hope that our novel paradigm will serve as a foundation for future experimental projects on the relationship between working memory performance and consciousness-an under-explored nexus whose investigation is likely to reveal insights about working memory, cognitive control, and metacognition.
研究人员已开始研究受试者在执行涉及反应干扰和工作记忆的任务时所经历的短暂冲动和倾向。在此研究基础上，我们开发了一种范式，即受试者在学会看到某些字母时按下特定按钮后，会看到两个与动作相关的字母（记忆项），但必须抑制反应（4秒），直到收到提示才做出与两个字母中仅一个相关的反应。在一致条件下，动作与提示相符（例如，记忆项=AB，提示=B，反应=B）；在不一致条件下，动作与记忆项的另一个项目相符（例如，记忆项=AB，提示=B，反应=A）。每次试验后，受试者输入对该试验中主观体验到的“犯错冲动”的评分。这些基于内省的数据表明，正如先前研究中所发现的，在不一致试验中犯错冲动最为强烈。我们的研究结果首先表明，受试者能够成功完成这项新任务，尽管它比先前的研究更为复杂；其次表明，在这种新范式中，可以逐次获得可靠的主观元认知数据。我们希望我们的新范式将为未来关于工作记忆表现与意识之间关系的实验项目奠定基础——这是一个尚未充分探索的联系，对其进行研究可能会揭示有关工作记忆、认知控制和元认知的见解。
