Cowan Nelson, Guitard Dominic
Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA.
School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2025 Apr;87(3):884-898. doi: 10.3758/s13414-025-03036-3. Epub 2025 Mar 18.
Performance in a short-term or working memory task may depend on the ability to construct and retain a representation of multiple items fitting a single, coherent scheme. Judging by a theoretical tradition based on selective attention tasks, there might be encoding of perceived items into working memory limited to a single coherent stream of information at a time. However, this notion of a single stream seems to conflict with another tradition in which several items can be absorbed into working memory and retained at once. In three large-scale experiments (N ~ 120 per experiment), we examined working memory for series of colors and tones that were presented either successively, with all of one modality before the other, or concurrently, with one tone accompanying each color but uncorrelated with it. The single-stream account would suggest considerable difficulty for the concurrent presentation method. However, no such effect was obtained. There was no effect of the presentation method in the recognition of items (Experiments 1 and 2) and only a small modifying effect in memory for the serial position of items (Experiment 3). All experiments replicated earlier findings of a detrimental effect of having to retain two sets compared to one, and of an asymmetry in which the dual-set effect was larger for the visual modality. The extant evidence supports a theory in which multiple, separate episodic streams can be encoded into working memory concurrently, provided that the rate of information input does not exceed a rate of processing.
在短期或工作记忆任务中的表现可能取决于构建和保留符合单一连贯模式的多个项目表征的能力。从基于选择性注意任务的理论传统来看，进入工作记忆的感知项目编码可能一次仅限于单一连贯的信息流。然而，这种单一流的概念似乎与另一种传统相冲突，在该传统中，几个项目可以同时被吸收到工作记忆中并被保留。在三项大规模实验中（每项实验约120名参与者），我们研究了对颜色和音调序列的工作记忆，这些颜色和音调序列要么相继呈现，一种模态的所有刺激在另一种模态之前呈现，要么同时呈现，每种颜色都伴有一个音调，但二者不相关。单一流的观点会认为同时呈现的方法会有相当大的困难。然而，并未得到这样的效果。呈现方式对项目识别没有影响（实验1和2），对项目序列位置的记忆只有很小的修正作用（实验3）。所有实验都重复了早期的研究结果，即与保留一组相比，保留两组会产生有害影响，并且存在不对称性，即视觉模态的双组效应更大。现有证据支持这样一种理论，即只要信息输入速率不超过处理速率，多个独立的情景流可以同时编码到工作记忆中。
