Department of Psychology, City, University of London, Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0HB, UK.
Mem Cognit. 2022 May;50(4):782-816. doi: 10.3758/s13421-021-01239-1. Epub 2022 Feb 4.
Our ability to briefly retain information is often limited. Proactive Interference (PI) might contribute to these limitations (e.g., when items in recognition tests are difficult to reject after having appeared recently). In visual Working Memory (WM), spatial information might protect WM against PI, especially if encoding items together with their spatial locations makes item-location combinations less confusable than simple items without a spatial component. Here, I ask (1) if PI is observed for spatially distributed items, (2) if it arises among simple items or among item-location combinations, and (3) if spatial information affects PI at all. I show that, contrary to views that spatial information protects against PI, PI is reliably observed for spatially distributed items except when it is weak. PI mostly reflects items that appear recently or frequently as memory items, while occurrences as test items play a smaller role, presumably because their temporal context is easier to encode. Through mathematical modeling, I then show that interference occurs among simple items rather than item-location combinations. Finally, to understand the effects of spatial information, I separate the effects of (a) the presence and (b) the predictiveness of spatial information on memory and its susceptibility to PI. Memory is impaired when items are spatially distributed, but, depending on the analysis, unaffected by the predictiveness of spatial information. In contrast, the susceptibility to PI is unaffected by either manipulation. Visual memory is thus impaired by PI for spatially distributed items due to interference from recent memory items (rather than test items or item-location combinations).
我们短暂保留信息的能力通常是有限的。前摄干扰（PI）可能会导致这些限制（例如，在识别测试中，最近出现的项目很难被拒绝）。在视觉工作记忆（WM）中，空间信息可能会保护 WM 免受 PI 的影响，特别是当一起编码项目及其空间位置使得项目-位置组合比没有空间成分的简单项目更不容易混淆时。在这里，我询问（1）是否存在空间分布项目的 PI，（2）PI 是出现在简单项目中还是出现在项目-位置组合中，以及（3）空间信息是否会影响 PI。我表明，与空间信息可以保护免受 PI 的观点相反，PI 是可靠地观察到空间分布项目，除非 PI 很弱。PI 主要反映最近或经常作为记忆项目出现的项目，而作为测试项目出现的情况则较少，这可能是因为它们的时间上下文更容易编码。然后，通过数学建模，我表明干扰发生在简单项目之间，而不是项目-位置组合之间。最后，为了理解空间信息的影响，我将空间信息的存在和（b）对记忆及其对 PI 的易感性的可预测性的影响分开。当项目在空间上分布时，记忆会受到损害，但根据分析，空间信息的可预测性对记忆没有影响。相比之下，PI 的易感性不受任何操作的影响。因此，由于最近记忆项目（而不是测试项目或项目-位置组合）的干扰，视觉记忆会因空间分布项目的 PI 而受损。
