Sali Anthony W, Egner Tobias
Department of Psychology, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC, USA.
Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2020 May;82(4):1858-1871. doi: 10.3758/s13414-019-01887-1.
Executive function, or cognitive control, describes the ability to guide information processing in line with internal goals, but the nature of-and relationship between-the component processes supporting this ability remains poorly understood. Two key components of cognitive control are thought to be the regulation of the declarative contents of working memory (WM) and the selection of task sets, or procedural rules that determine how declarative items are employed. Factor-analytic studies have suggested that updating the items held in WM and updating task sets are cognitively distinct, but interrelated, core domains of executive function. However, the precise relationship between these processes remains unknown, since they have rarely been tested simultaneously in a single task. In the present study, we devised a novel method of independently manipulating declarative item-updating and procedural task-updating processes in WM. Across two experiments, we found that the updating of declarative and procedural WM representations interacted subadditively, suggesting they are not constrained by a common processing bottleneck. Moreover, in a third experiment, we found that updating two declarative items in WM simultaneously did not incur a behavioral cost in response time above and beyond the cost of one item alone. Taken together, our results provide new evidence that the updating of information in declarative and procedural WM is mutually facilitative, such that opening the gate for updating declarative content reduces the time needed to update procedural content, and vice versa.
执行功能，或认知控制，描述了根据内部目标引导信息处理的能力，但支持这种能力的组成过程的性质及其之间的关系仍知之甚少。认知控制的两个关键组成部分被认为是对工作记忆（WM）陈述性内容的调节以及任务集的选择，即决定如何运用陈述性项目的程序规则。因素分析研究表明，更新工作记忆中保存的项目和更新任务集在认知上是不同但相互关联的执行功能核心领域。然而，这些过程之间的确切关系仍然未知，因为它们很少在单一任务中同时受到测试。在本研究中，我们设计了一种新颖的方法来独立操纵工作记忆中的陈述性项目更新和程序性任务更新过程。在两个实验中，我们发现陈述性和程序性工作记忆表征的更新以次可加的方式相互作用，这表明它们不受共同处理瓶颈的限制。此外，在第三个实验中，我们发现同时更新工作记忆中的两个陈述性项目不会在响应时间上产生超出单独更新一个项目的行为成本。综合来看，我们的结果提供了新的证据，表明陈述性和程序性工作记忆中的信息更新是相互促进的，即打开陈述性内容更新的大门会减少更新程序性内容所需的时间，反之亦然。
