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Journal article
Proactive interference and practice effects in visuospatial working memory span task performance
Memory (Hove), Vol.19(1), pp.83-91
01/01/2011
PMID: 21240750
Web of Science ID: WOS:000287407400007
Abstract
In the current study the influence of proactive interference (PI) and practice on recall from a visuospatial working memory (WM) task was examined. Participants completed a visuospatial WM span task under either high-PI conditions (a traditional span task) or low-PI conditions (a span task with breaks between trials). Trials of each length (i.e., two to five to-be-remembered items) were equally distributed across three blocks in order to examine practice effects. Recall increased across blocks to a greater extent in the low-PI condition than in the high-PI condition, indicating that reducing PI increased recall from WM. Additionally, in the final block the correlation between fluid intelligence and WM recall was stronger for the high-PI condition than the low-PI condition, indicating that practice reduced the strength of the correlation between span task recall and fluid intelligence, but only in the low-PI condition. These results support current theories that propose that one source of variability in recall from WM span task is the build-up of PI, and that PI build-up is an important contributing factor to the relation between visuospatial WM span task recall and higher-level cognition.
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Details
- Title
- Proactive interference and practice effects in visuospatial working memory span task performance
- Publication Details
- Memory (Hove), Vol.19(1), pp.83-91
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publisher
- Taylor & Francis Group
- Copyright
- © 2011 Psychology Press, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business
- Identifiers
- WOS:000287407400007; 99380180085706600
- Academic Unit
- Psychology; Usha Kundu, MD College of Health
- Language
- English