Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
PLoS One. 2018 Oct 3;13(10):e0204640. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0204640. eCollection 2018.
The Meaning Maintenance Model posits that individuals seek to resolve uncertainty by searching for patterns in the environment, yet little is known about how this is accomplished. Four studies investigated whether uncertainty has an effect on people's cognitive functioning. In particular, we investigated whether meaning threats lead to increased working memory capacity. In each study, we exposed participants to either an uncertain stimulus used to threaten meaning in past studies, or a control stimulus. Participants then completed a working memory measure, where they either had to recall lists of words (Studies 1, 2), or strings of digits (Studies 3, 4). We used both a frequentist approach and Bayesian analysis to evaluate our findings. Across the four studies, we find a small but consistent effect, where participants in the meaning threat condition show improved performance on the working memory tasks. Overall, our findings were consistent with the hypothesis that working memory capacity increases when people experience a meaning threat, which may help to explain improved pattern recognition. Additionally, our results highlight the value of using a Bayesian analytic approach, particularly when studying phenomena with high variance.
意义维持模型假设，个体通过在环境中寻找模式来解决不确定性，但对于如何实现这一点知之甚少。四项研究调查了不确定性是否会影响人们的认知功能。具体来说，我们研究了意义威胁是否会导致工作记忆容量增加。在每项研究中，我们都让参与者接触到过去研究中用于威胁意义的不确定刺激或控制刺激。然后，参与者完成一项工作记忆测试，他们要么需要回忆单词列表（研究 1、2），要么回忆数字串（研究 3、4）。我们使用了频率主义方法和贝叶斯分析来评估我们的发现。在四项研究中，我们发现了一个小而一致的影响，即在意义威胁条件下的参与者在工作记忆任务中的表现有所提高。总的来说，我们的研究结果与工作记忆容量在人们经历意义威胁时增加的假设一致，这可能有助于解释模式识别的改善。此外，我们的结果强调了使用贝叶斯分析方法的价值，特别是在研究具有高变异性的现象时。
