Revisiting the Attentional Demands of Rehearsal in Working-Memory Tasks

There is a recent surge of interest in maintenance processes in working memory, such as articulatory rehearsal, elaboration, and attentional refreshing. Yet, we know little about the central attentional demand of these processes. It has been assumed that articulatory rehearsal does not require central attention at all (Vergauwe, Camos, & Barrouillet, 2014), being in essence a cost-free strategy. In contrast, elaboration and attentional refreshing are assumed to incur large and continuous costs on central attention. We tested these assumptions in three experiments in which participants were presented with a varying number of words to rehearse. Participants were instructed to rehearse the words aloud, or to elaborate them by creating interactive images. Attentional refreshing was examined in a condition in which words were to be maintained during articulatory suppression. During retention participants carried out a series of choice reaction tasks, which were used to measure central attentional demands of the maintenance strategies. Articulatory rehearsal had costs on processing RTs that lasted for 10 s. These costs started to be clearly attributable to central attention when at least four words had to be rehearsed. Elaboration imposed substantial costs on central attention primarily briefly after the memoranda were presented. Finally, maintenance of words during articulatory suppression did not yield persistent costs on central attention, implying that participants did not continuously refresh the words.

近期，对工作记忆中维护过程的研究兴趣日益高涨，例如发音练习、内容扩展和注意力刷新。然而，我们对这些过程的核心注意力需求所知甚少。以往假设发音练习根本不需要中央注意力（参见 Vergauwe, Camos, & Barrouillet, 2014），本质上是一种无成本的策略。相反，内容扩展和注意力刷新被认为会对中央注意力产生巨大且持续的消耗。我们通过三项实验对这些假设进行了测试，实验中参与者被要求以不同数量的词汇进行练习。参与者被指导大声复述这些词汇，或通过创建交互式图像来扩展它们。在发音抑制期间维持词汇的条件下，考察了注意力刷新。在保持阶段，参与者执行了一系列选择反应任务，这些任务被用来测量维护策略的中央注意力需求。发音练习对处理反应时产生了持续10秒的成本。当需要复述至少四个词汇时，这些成本开始明显归因于中央注意力。相比之下，内容扩展在备忘录呈现后主要在短时间内对中央注意力产生显著消耗。最后，在发音抑制期间维持词汇并未导致中央注意力的持续消耗，这表明参与者并未持续刷新这些词汇。