空间工作记忆与注意广度

The relationship between working memory (WM) and attention has attracted many researchers. In his embedded-processes model of WM, Cowan (1999, 2001) uses the term focus of attention to refer to the core component of WM, and proposes that the focus of attention of WM and that of perception have the same span, which is a fixed number. This hypothesis about the scope of attention has seldom been tested, although considerable studies have revealed that WM and attention have overlapping mechanisms. The present dissertation tests this hypothesis by examining the dual-task interference between Corsi Blocks Task (CBT) and Mutilple Object Tracking (MOT) and the findings demenstrate that Cowan’s hypothesis is not exactly true. The results of our first study show that the interference effect of MOT on CBT is a reliable indicator of whether and to which extent the attentional resoureces of WM and perception overlap. In the second study we find that the capacity of the common resources is not a fixed number but varies with the difficulty of control of attention. And the third study indicates that attentional resources used in WM and perception are partly independent, the overlapping part can attend to only one or two items or locations at a time. These findings can contribute to future studies on the capacity limitation of different cognitive functions, and to the development of relevant ability tests.