Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University, China.
Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University, China.
Cognition. 2020 Apr;197:104160. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104160. Epub 2020 Jan 13.
Failing to remember the source of retrievable information is known as source amnesia. This phenomenon has been extensively investigated in long-term memory but rarely in working memory, as we share the intuition that the source information of an item that we have encountered in the immediate past is always available. However, a recent study (Chen, Carlson, & Wyble, 2018) challenged this common sense by showing the source amnesia for simple visual stimuli (e.g., colored square) in the context of working memory when participants did not expect having to report source information, which indicated that the source information of visual stimuli was not automatically encoded into working memory. The current study sought to further examine this newly discovered phenomenon by testing whether it persists with complex and meaningful stimuli in the visual modality (Experiments 1, 4a & 4b), cross-visual-and-auditory modalities (Experiments 2a & 2b), and within-auditory modality (Experiment 3). Interestingly, the results revealed that short-term source amnesia was a robust effect in the visual modality even for complex and meaningful stimuli, whereas it was absent in the cross-visual-and-auditory or within-auditory modalities, regardless of reporting expectation. This indicates differences in working memory representations of visual and auditory stimuli, namely, the representation of auditory stimuli was stored together with the corresponding original sources, while that of visual stimuli was stored independently of its source information. These findings have crucial implications for further clarifying the longstanding debate regarding whether or not there is a modality-independent working memory storage system for different modalities.
无法记住可检索信息的来源被称为源遗忘。这种现象在长期记忆中得到了广泛研究，但在工作记忆中很少见，因为我们凭直觉认为，我们在最近过去遇到的项目的来源信息总是可用的。然而，最近的一项研究（Chen、Carlson 和 Wyble，2018）通过在工作记忆中挑战了这种常识，即当参与者不期望报告来源信息时，他们对简单视觉刺激（例如，彩色方块）的源遗忘，这表明视觉刺激的来源信息没有自动编码到工作记忆中。本研究试图通过测试在视觉模态（实验 1、4a 和 4b）、跨视觉和听觉模态（实验 2a 和 2b）以及听觉模态内（实验 3）是否存在复杂且有意义的刺激，进一步研究这种新发现的现象。有趣的是，结果表明，即使对于复杂且有意义的刺激，短期源遗忘在视觉模态中也是一种稳健的效应，而在跨视觉和听觉模态或听觉模态内则不存在，无论报告期望如何。这表明视觉和听觉刺激的工作记忆表示存在差异，即听觉刺激的表示与相应的原始来源一起存储，而视觉刺激的表示与其源信息独立存储。这些发现对于进一步阐明关于是否存在一个独立于模态的工作记忆存储系统来存储不同模态的长期争论具有重要意义。
