Ades James, Mishra Jyoti
Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.
Vision (Basel). 2022 Jan 21;6(1):7. doi: 10.3390/vision6010007.
Precision of working memory (WM) refers to the objective performance of individuals when trying to recall the features of the encoded WM items. Studies of precision in VWM aim to identify whether differences in WM performance within individuals are sensitive to individual states or traits. In this systematic review, we study VWM precision and whether it reflects true differences in ability to accurately store information, and thereby possibly a more sensitive measure than discrete VWM span alone. Sifting through 327 abstracts, we identified 34 relevant articles. After assessing these articles with regard to our inclusion criteria to test participants at two separate time points and have a sample size of at least fifteen participants, we found four longitudinal studies regarding VWM precision. One review author and two reviewers independently assessed all studies in the screening and selection process and extracted outcome measures, study characteristics, and, when possible, test-retest reliability metrics. Given the small and heterogeneous sample, this systematic review could not yet provide conclusive evidence on the sensitivity of VWM precision paradigms. Future research of VWM should include longitudinal studies of precision, and address both test-retest reliability in healthy adults and changes in precision during key developmental trajectory periods and in clinical populations.
工作记忆（WM）的精确性是指个体在试图回忆已编码的WM项目特征时的客观表现。视觉工作记忆（VWM）精确性的研究旨在确定个体内部WM表现的差异是否对个体状态或特质敏感。在本系统评价中，我们研究VWM精确性，以及它是否反映了准确存储信息能力的真实差异，从而可能是一种比单纯离散VWM广度更敏感的测量方法。在筛选了327篇摘要后，我们确定了34篇相关文章。在根据我们的纳入标准评估这些文章，以在两个不同时间点对参与者进行测试且样本量至少为15名参与者后，我们发现了四项关于VWM精确性的纵向研究。一名综述作者和两名评审员在筛选和选择过程中独立评估了所有研究，并提取了结果测量指标、研究特征，以及在可能的情况下提取重测信度指标。鉴于样本量小且异质性大，本系统评价尚未能就VWM精确性范式的敏感性提供确凿证据。未来VWM的研究应包括精确性的纵向研究，并解决健康成年人的重测信度以及关键发育轨迹期和临床人群中精确性的变化问题。
