Department of Behavioural Neuroscience, Institute of Normal and Pathological Physiology, Centre of Experimental Medicine, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Sienkiewiczova 1, 813 71, Bratislava, Slovakia.
Department of Applied Informatics, Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics, Comenius University in Bratislava, Mlynská dolina F1, 842 48, Bratislava, Slovakia.
Mem Cognit. 2023 Jul;51(5):1145-1158. doi: 10.3758/s13421-022-01388-x. Epub 2023 Jan 17.
Growing evidence indicates that a domain-general executive control supports semantic memory retrieval, yet the nature of this interaction remains elusive. To shed light on such control mechanisms, we conducted two dual-task experiments loading distinct executive capacities (working memory maintenance, monitoring, and switching), while participants carried out automatic (free-associative) and controlled (dissociative) word retrieval tasks. We found that these forms of executive load interfered with retrieval fluency in both tasks, but these negative effects were more pronounced for the dissociative performance. Together, these findings indicate that the domain-general executive control supports accessing contextually relevant knowledge as well as the inhibition of automatically activated but task-inappropriate retrieval candidates, putatively via an adaptive gating of semantic activation and interference control. Moreover, the processing costs related to retrieval inhibition and switching were negatively correlated, suggesting a trade-off between the ability to constrain semantic activation (i.e., inhibition) and the ability to initiate flexible transitions between semantic sets (i.e., switching), which may thus represent two complementary control functions governing semantic memory retrieval.
越来越多的证据表明，一种领域一般性的执行控制支持语义记忆检索，然而这种相互作用的本质仍然难以捉摸。为了阐明这种控制机制，我们进行了两项双重任务实验，加载了不同的执行能力（工作记忆维持、监控和转换），而参与者则进行了自动（自由联想）和受控（分离）的单词检索任务。我们发现，这些形式的执行负载会干扰两种任务的检索流畅度，但对于分离表现，这些负面影响更为明显。总之，这些发现表明，领域一般性的执行控制支持访问上下文相关的知识，以及抑制自动激活但任务不适当的检索候选，可能是通过对语义激活和干扰控制的自适应门控来实现的。此外，与检索抑制和转换相关的处理成本呈负相关，这表明在限制语义激活（即抑制）的能力和在语义集之间灵活转换（即转换）的能力之间存在权衡，这可能代表了两种互补的控制功能，控制着语义记忆检索。
