Proactive interference and practice effects in visuospatial working memory span task performance.
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.
School of Psychological and Behavioral Sciences, University of West Florida, 11000 University Parkway, Pensacola, FL 32514, USA. lblalock@uwf.edu
Lisa Durrance
LD
Blalock
David P
DP
McCabe
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007360:Intelligence; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D011939:Mental Recall; D011214:Practice, Psychological; D011334:Proactive Inhibition; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011897:Random Allocation; D013028:Space Perception