Di Santo Serena, De Luca Vanni, Isaja Alessio, Andreetta Sara
Cognitive Neuroscience, Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, I-34136 Trieste, Italy.
Scuola Peripatetica d'Arte Mnemonica (S.P.A.M.), 10125 Turin, Italy.
Entropy (Basel). 2020 May 20;22(5):577. doi: 10.3390/e22050577.
Recently, there has been increasing interest in techniques for enhancing working memory (WM), casting a new light on the classical picture of a rigid system. One reason is that WM performance has been associated with intelligence and reasoning, while its impairment showed correlations with cognitive deficits, hence the possibility of training it is highly appealing. However, results on WM changes following training are controversial, leaving it unclear whether it can really be potentiated. This study aims at assessing changes in WM performance by comparing it with and without training by a professional mnemonist. Two groups, experimental and control, participated in the study, organized in two phases. In the morning, both groups were familiarized with stimuli through an N-back task, and then attended a 2-hour lecture. For the experimental group, the lecture, given by the mnemonist, introduced memory encoding techniques; for the control group, it was a standard academic lecture about memory systems. In the afternoon, both groups were administered five tests, in which they had to remember the position of 16 items, when asked in random order. The results show much better performance in trained subjects, indicating the need to consider such possibility of enhancement, alongside general information-theoretic constraints, when theorizing about WM span.
最近，人们对增强工作记忆（WM）的技术越来越感兴趣，这为僵化系统的经典图景带来了新的视角。一个原因是，WM表现与智力和推理相关，而其受损则与认知缺陷相关，因此训练WM的可能性极具吸引力。然而，关于训练后WM变化的结果存在争议，尚不清楚它是否真的可以得到增强。本研究旨在通过比较有专业记忆专家训练和无训练情况下的WM表现，来评估WM表现的变化。实验和控制两个组参与了该研究，研究分为两个阶段。上午，两组都通过n-back任务熟悉刺激，然后参加一场两小时的讲座。对于实验组，由记忆专家讲授的讲座介绍了记忆编码技术；对于控制组，是一场关于记忆系统的标准学术讲座。下午，两组都接受了五项测试，测试中他们需要在被随机提问时记住16个项目的位置。结果显示，接受训练的受试者表现要好得多，这表明在对WM广度进行理论化时，除了一般信息理论限制外，还需要考虑这种增强的可能性。
