Visual Working Memory Capacity and Proactive Interference
Visual Working Memory Capacity and Proactive Interference
复制标题
DOI：
10.1371/journal.pone.0002716
复制
发表时间：
2008-07-23
期刊：
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Hartshorne, Joshua K.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Hartshorne, Joshua K.
背景：视觉工作记忆容量是极其有限的，似乎相对不受练习效果或使用外显策略的影响。最近的研究发现，视觉工作记忆任务，像言语工作记忆任务一样，会受到主动干扰，再加上典型的视觉工作记忆任务特别有利于主动干扰，这表明视觉工作记忆的容量可能被系统性地低估了。方法/主要发现：在实验室环境和通过互联网对成年人的工作记忆容量进行了行为调查。几个实验表明，虽然主动干扰对视觉工作记忆的影响是显著的，并且可以持续几次，但它只改变了大约15%的容量估计。结论/意义：本研究进一步证实了视觉工作记忆容量在绝对和相对于言语工作记忆方面的明显局限性。研究人员建议，未来的研究应考虑到这些局限性，以理解人类成年人、语言前婴儿和非语言动物之间各种任务的差异。
Background: Visual working memory capacity is extremely limited and appears to be relatively immune to practice effects or the use of explicit strategies. The recent discovery that visual working memory tasks, like verbal working memory tasks, are subject to proactive interference, coupled with the fact that typical visual working memory tasks are particularly conducive to proactive interference, suggests that visual working memory capacity may be systematically under-estimated.Methodology/Principal Findings: Working memory capacity was probed behaviorally in adult humans both in laboratory settings and via the Internet. Several experiments show that although the effect of proactive interference on visual working memory is significant and can last over several trials, it only changes the capacity estimate by about 15%.Conclusions/Significance: This study further confirms the sharp limitations on visual working memory capacity, both in absolute terms and relative to verbal working memory. It is suggested that future research take these limitations into account in understanding differences across a variety of tasks between human adults, prelinguistic infants and nonlinguistic animals.