Ginsburg Véronique, Archambeau Kim, van Dijck Jean-Philippe, Chetail Fabienne, Gevers Wim
Center for Research in Cognition and Neurosciences, Université Libre de Bruxelles.
Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2017 May;146(5):632-650. doi: 10.1037/xge0000278.
In the domain of working memory, recent theories postulate that the maintenance of serial order is driven by position marking. According to this idea, serial order is maintained though associations of each item with an independent representation of the position that the item constitutes in the sequence. Recent studies suggest that those position markers are spatial in nature, with the beginning items associated with left side and the end elements with the right side of space (i.e., the ordinal position effect). So far however, it is unclear whether serial order is coded along the same principles in the verbal and the visuospatial domain. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether serial order is coded in a domain general fashion or not. To unravel this question, 6 experiments were conducted. The first 3 experiments revealed that the ordinal position effect is found with verbal but not with spatial information. In the subsequent experiments, the authors isolated the origin of this dissociation and conclude that to obtain spatial coding of serial order, it is not the nature of the encoded information (verbal, visual, or spatial) that is crucial, but whether the memoranda are semantically processed or not. This work supports the idea that serial order is coded in a domain general fashion, but suggests that position markers are only spatially coded when the to-be-remembered information is processed at the semantic level. (PsycINFO Database Record
在工作记忆领域，近期理论假定序列顺序的维持是由位置标记驱动的。根据这一观点，序列顺序通过每个项目与该项目在序列中所占据位置的独立表征之间的关联得以维持。近期研究表明，那些位置标记本质上是空间性的，起始项目与空间左侧相关联，末尾元素与空间右侧相关联（即顺序位置效应）。然而，到目前为止，尚不清楚在言语和视觉空间领域中，序列顺序是否按照相同原则进行编码。本研究的目的是调查序列顺序是否以一种领域通用的方式进行编码。为了解决这个问题，进行了6项实验。前3项实验表明，顺序位置效应在言语信息中存在，而在空间信息中不存在。在随后的实验中，作者确定了这种分离的根源，并得出结论：要获得序列顺序的空间编码，关键不是编码信息的性质（言语、视觉或空间），而是要记忆的内容是否经过语义处理。这项研究支持了序列顺序以领域通用方式进行编码的观点，但表明只有当要记忆的信息在语义层面进行处理时，位置标记才会进行空间编码。（《心理学文摘数据库记录》 ）
