title: Active versus passive maintenance of visual nonverbal memory.
abstract: Forgetting over the short term has challenged researchers for more than a century, largely because of the difficulty of controlling what goes on within the memory retention interval. But the "recent-negative-probe" procedure offers a valuable paradigm, by examining the influences of (presumably) unattended memoranda from prior trials. Here we used a recent-probe task to investigate forgetting for visual nonverbal short-term memory. The target stimuli (two visually presented abstract shapes) on a trial were followed after a retention interval by a probe, and participants indicated whether the probe matched one of the target items. Proactive interference, and hence memory for old trial probes, was observed, whereby participants were slowed in rejecting a nonmatching probe on the current trial that nevertheless matched a target item on the previous trial (a recent-negative probe). The attraction of the paradigm is that, by uncovering proactive influences of past-trial probe stimuli, it can be argued that active maintenance in memory of those probes is unlikely. In two experiments, we recorded such proactive interference of prior-trial items over a range of interstimulus (ISI) and intertrial (ITI) intervals (between 1 and 6 s, respectively). Consistent with a proposed two-process memory conception (the active-passive memory model, or APM), actively maintained memories on current trials decayed, but passively "maintained," or unattended, visual memories of stimuli on past trials did not.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Psychological Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK, d.mckeown@leeds.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Denis
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: McKeown
authors.forename: Jessica
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Holt
authors.forename: Jean-Francois
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: Delvenne
authors.forename: Amy
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.forename: Benjamin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Griffiths
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011334:Proactive Inhibition; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D013997:Time Factors