Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Binzmühlestrasse 14, 8050, Zürich, Switzerland.
University of Liège, Liège, Belgium.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2021 Aug;28(4):1301-1312. doi: 10.3758/s13423-021-01902-3. Epub 2021 Mar 25.
The maintenance of serial order information is a core component of working memory (WM). Many theoretical models assume the existence of specific serial order mechanisms. Those are considered to be independent from the linguistic system supporting maintenance of item information. This is based on studies showing that psycholinguistic factors strongly affect the ability to maintain item information, while leaving order recall relatively unaffected. Recent language-based accounts suggest, however, that the linguistic system could provide mechanisms that are sufficient for serial order maintenance. A strong version of these accounts postulates serial order maintenance as emerging from the pattern of activation occurring in the linguistic system. In the present study, we tested this assumption via a computational modeling approach by implementing a purely activation-based architecture. We tested this architecture against several experiments involving the manipulation of semantic relatedness, a psycholinguistic variable that has been shown to interact with serial order processing in a complex manner. We show that this activation-based architecture struggles to account for interactions between semantic knowledge and serial order processing. This study fails to support activated long-term memory as an exclusive mechanism supporting serial order maintenance.
序列信息的维持是工作记忆 (WM) 的核心组成部分。许多理论模型假设存在特定的序列顺序机制。这些机制被认为独立于支持项目信息维持的语言系统。这是基于这样的研究，即心理语言学因素强烈影响维持项目信息的能力，而相对不受顺序回忆的影响。然而，最近基于语言的解释表明，语言系统可以提供足够的序列顺序维持机制。这些解释的一个强烈观点假设，序列顺序维持是从语言系统中发生的激活模式中出现的。在本研究中，我们通过实现一种纯粹基于激活的架构，通过计算建模方法来测试这一假设。我们针对涉及语义相关性操纵的几个实验来测试该架构，语义相关性是一种心理语言学变量，它已被证明以复杂的方式与序列顺序处理相互作用。我们表明，这种基于激活的架构难以解释语义知识和序列顺序处理之间的相互作用。这项研究未能支持激活的长期记忆作为支持序列顺序维持的唯一机制。
