Bartsch Lea M, Frischkorn Gidon T, Shepherdson Peter
Univeristy of Zurich, CH.
Univeristy of Akureyri, IS.
J Cogn. 2024 May 15;7(1):44. doi: 10.5334/joc.368. eCollection 2024.
Previous studies found that episodic long-term memory (eLTM) enhances working memory (WM) performance when both novel and previously learnt word pairs must be retained on a short-term basis. However, there is uncertainty regarding how and when WM draws on eLTM. Three possibilities are (a) that people draw on eLTM only if WM capacity is exceeded; (b) that there is a contribution of eLTM to WM performance, irrespective of whether prior knowledge is helpful or not; or (c) benefits of prior knowledge are specific to comparisons between conditions which are similarly ambiguous concerning whether LTM may be useful. We built on the assumption that under conditions of a contribution from LTM, these LTM traces of memoranda could benefit or hamper performance in WM tasks depending on the match between the traces stored in LTM and the ones to-be stored in WM in the current trial, yielding proactive facilitation (PF) and proactive interference (PI), respectively. Across four experiments, we familiarized participants with some items before they completed a separate WM task. In accordance with possibility (a) we show that there are indeed conditions in which only WM contributes to performance. Performance deteriorated with the addition of stimuli from eLTM when WM load was low, but not when it was high; and an exchange of information between LTM and WM occurred only when WM capacity was exceeded, with PI and PF effects affecting immediate memory performance in verbal and visual tasks only at higher set sizes.
先前的研究发现，当新的和先前学过的单词对都必须在短期内被记住时，情景长期记忆（eLTM）会提高工作记忆（WM）的表现。然而，关于WM如何以及何时利用eLTM仍存在不确定性。有三种可能性：（a）人们只有在WM容量被超过时才会利用eLTM；（b）无论先前的知识是否有帮助，eLTM都会对WM表现有所贡献；或者（c）先前知识的益处特定于在LTM是否有用同样模糊的条件之间的比较。我们基于这样的假设，即在LTM有贡献的条件下，这些记忆痕迹可能会根据LTM中存储的痕迹与当前试验中要存储在WM中的痕迹之间的匹配情况，对WM任务的表现产生促进或阻碍作用，分别产生前摄促进（PF）和前摄干扰（PI）。在四项实验中，我们让参与者在完成一项单独的WM任务之前熟悉一些项目。根据可能性（a），我们表明确实存在只有WM对表现有贡献的情况。当WM负荷较低时，添加来自eLTM的刺激会使表现变差，但当WM负荷较高时则不会；并且只有当WM容量被超过时，LTM和WM之间才会发生信息交换，PI和PF效应仅在较高的集合大小下才会影响言语和视觉任务中的即时记忆表现。
