Dames Hannah, Li Chenyu, Frischkorn Gidon T, Oberauer Klaus
Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Binzmühlestrasse 14/22, 8050, Zurich, Switzerland.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2025 Feb;32(1):430-441. doi: 10.3758/s13423-024-02550-z. Epub 2024 Aug 5.
Ideally, removing outdated information from working memory (WM) should have two consequences: The removed content should be less accessible (removal costs), and other WM content should benefit from the freeing up of WM capacity (removal benefits). Robust removal benefits and removal costs have been demonstrated when people are told to forget items shortly after they were encoded (immediate removal). However, other studies suggest that people might be unable to selectively remove items from an already encoded set of items (delayed removal). In two experiments (n = 219; n = 241), we investigated the effectiveness and consequences of delayed removal by combining a modified version of Ecker's et al. (Journal of Memory and Language, 74, 77-90, 2014) letter updating task with a directed-forgetting in WM paradigm. We found that while delayed removal resulted in reduced memory for the to-be-forgotten item-location relations (removal costs), it failed to enhance performance for existing WM content. This contrasts sharply with immediate removal, where removal benefits can be observed. A fine-grained analysis of removal benefits shows that removal from WM proactively facilitates the subsequent encoding of new information but does not retroactively aid stored WM content.
理想情况下，从工作记忆（WM）中移除过时信息应产生两个结果：被移除的内容应更难被访问（移除成本），并且其他WM内容应从WM容量的释放中受益（移除收益）。当人们在对项目进行编码后不久就被要求忘记这些项目时（即时移除），已证明存在强大的移除收益和移除成本。然而，其他研究表明，人们可能无法从已经编码的一组项目中选择性地移除项目（延迟移除）。在两项实验中（n = 219；n = 241），我们通过将埃克等人（《记忆与语言杂志》，第74卷，第77 - 90页，2014年）的字母更新任务的修改版本与WM范式中的定向遗忘相结合，研究了延迟移除的有效性和后果。我们发现，虽然延迟移除导致对要遗忘的项目 - 位置关系的记忆减少（移除成本），但它未能提高现有WM内容的表现。这与即时移除形成鲜明对比，即时移除中可以观察到移除收益。对移除收益的细粒度分析表明，从WM中移除会主动促进新信息的后续编码，但不会追溯帮助已存储的WM内容。
