Department of Psychological Sciences, Rice University, 6100 Main St, Houston, TX, MS-651, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2024 Nov;52(8):1816-1832. doi: 10.3758/s13421-024-01566-z. Epub 2024 May 14.
Working- and long-term memory are often studied in isolation. To better understand the specific limitations of working memory, effort is made to reduce the potential influence of long-term memory on performance in working memory tasks (e.g., asking participants to remember artificial, abstract items rather than familiar real-world objects). However, in everyday life we use working- and long-term memory in tandem. Here, our goal was to characterize how long-term memory can be recruited to circumvent capacity limits in a typical visual working memory task (i.e., remembering colored squares). Prior work has shown that incidental repetitions of working memory arrays often do not improve visual working memory performance - even after dozens of incidental repetitions, working memory performance often shows no improvement for repeated arrays. Here, we used a whole-report working memory task with explicit rather than incidental repetitions of arrays. In contrast to prior work with incidental repetitions, in two behavioral experiments we found that explicit repetitions of arrays yielded robust improvement to working memory performance, even after a single repetition. Participants performed above chance at recognizing repeated arrays in a later long-term memory test, consistent with the idea that long-term memory was used to rapidly improve performance across array repetitions. Finally, we analyzed inter-item response times and we found a response time signature of chunk formation that only emerged after the array was repeated (inter-response time slowing after two to three items); thus, inter-item response times may be useful for examining the coordinated interaction of visual working and long-term memory in future work.
工作记忆和长期记忆通常是分开研究的。为了更好地理解工作记忆的具体局限性，人们努力减少长期记忆对工作记忆任务表现的潜在影响（例如，要求参与者记住人为的、抽象的项目，而不是熟悉的现实世界的物体）。然而，在日常生活中，我们同时使用工作记忆和长期记忆。在这里，我们的目标是描述长期记忆如何在典型的视觉工作记忆任务（即记住彩色方块）中被招募来绕过容量限制。先前的工作表明，工作记忆数组的偶然重复通常不会提高视觉工作记忆的表现——即使经过几十次偶然重复，工作记忆的表现对于重复的数组通常也没有改善。在这里，我们使用了一个全报告工作记忆任务，对数组进行了明确的而不是偶然的重复。与先前的偶然重复工作不同，在两个行为实验中，我们发现，即使只重复一次，数组的明确重复也能显著提高工作记忆的表现。参与者在稍后的长期记忆测试中对重复的数组的识别表现优于机会水平，这与长期记忆被用来快速提高数组重复的表现的观点一致。最后，我们分析了项目间的反应时间，发现了只有在数组被重复后才会出现的块形成的反应时间特征（在两到三个项目之后的反应时间减慢）；因此，项目间的反应时间在未来的工作中可能有助于检查视觉工作记忆和长期记忆的协调相互作用。
