University of Liège, Liège, Belgium; Université Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France; Fund for Scientific Research - F.R.S.-FNRS, Brussels, Belgium.
University of Liège, Liège, Belgium; Fund for Scientific Research - F.R.S.-FNRS, Brussels, Belgium.
Cognition. 2020 Sep;202:104278. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104278. Epub 2020 May 23.
Several studies have demonstrated an influence of semantic knowledge on verbal working memory (WM) performance, such as shown by the observation of semantic relatedness (related vs. unrelated words) and word imageability (high vs. low imageability words) effects in working memory. The present study extends these observations by examining in four experiments the extent to which semantic knowledge can protect WM representations against interference. We assessed immediate serial recall performance for semantically related vs. unrelated word lists and for high vs. low imageability word lists, with memory lists being followed by an interfering task after encoding or not. Results show that semantic relatedness leads to a stronger protective effect against interference than word imageability at the item level. Furthermore, the semantic relatedness had a stronger impact on WM performance than word imageability; this was further supported by a meta-analysis of all relevant studies in the field. These results suggest that inter-item associative semantic knowledge can protect WM content against interference, but less so item-level semantic knowledge. This protective effect may result from between-item recurrent reactivation or from reduced cognitive load via the compression of memoranda into conceptual units, as further supported by a series of computational simulations.
多项研究表明，语义知识会对言语工作记忆（WM）表现产生影响，例如在工作记忆中观察到语义相关性（相关与不相关的词）和词汇可想象性（高与低可想象性的词）的影响。本研究通过四个实验扩展了这些观察，检验了语义知识在何种程度上可以保护 WM 表示免受干扰。我们评估了语义相关词列表与不相关词列表以及高可想象性词列表与低可想象性词列表在即时顺序回忆中的表现，在编码后是否有干扰任务。结果表明，在项目水平上，语义相关性比词汇可想象性产生更强的保护作用，防止干扰。此外，语义相关性对 WM 表现的影响大于词汇可想象性；这得到了对该领域所有相关研究的元分析的进一步支持。这些结果表明，项目间的联想语义知识可以保护 WM 内容免受干扰，但项目级的语义知识则不然。这种保护效应可能源于项目间的反复重新激活，也可能源于通过将记忆压缩成概念单元来减轻认知负荷，这进一步得到了一系列计算模拟的支持。
