Faculté de Psychologie et des Sciences de l'Education, University of Geneva, Switzerland.
Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2018 Jul;1424(1):102-114. doi: 10.1111/nyas.13630. Epub 2018 Apr 23.
Refreshing is one of the mechanisms proposed to maintain information in human working memory. The mechanism is assumed to operate serially, boosting the items of a memory list one after the other. In the current study, we test the most straightforward implementation of serial refreshing, by which refreshing spontaneously reproduces the order of presentation, starting with the first memory item and cycling through the list in a forward fashion, to support short-term memory of a list. Therefore, we examined verbal serial recall performance under different instructed-refreshing schedules that varied in their similarity to cumulative, forward-order refreshing. This was done by manipulating whether instructed refreshing started with the first memory item, and whether instructed refreshing proceeded in forward order through the list. We expected recall performance to be poorer as participants were required to think of the list items in a way that was more dissimilar to what they would have done spontaneously. However, across four experiments, we observed that recall performance was not drastically affected by the nature of instructed refreshing and thus, we did not find any evidence that cumulative, forward-order refreshing supports serial verbal WM performance.
刷新是被提出用于维持人类工作记忆中信息的机制之一。该机制被假设是串行运作的，一个接一个地增强记忆列表中的项目。在当前的研究中，我们通过最直接的串行刷新实现来测试该机制，其中刷新会自发地再现呈现的顺序，从第一个记忆项目开始，并以正向方式循环遍历列表，以支持列表的短期记忆。因此，我们在不同的指令刷新计划下检查了口头串行回忆表现，这些计划在与累积、正向顺序刷新的相似性方面有所不同。这是通过操纵指令刷新是否从第一个记忆项目开始，以及指令刷新是否以正向顺序通过列表进行来实现的。我们预计，当参与者被要求以一种与他们自发完成的方式不太相似的方式来思考列表项目时，回忆表现会更差。然而，在四个实验中，我们观察到，指令刷新的性质并没有对回忆表现产生显著影响，因此，我们没有发现累积的、正向顺序刷新支持串行口头 WM 表现的任何证据。
