| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 心理學所 === 98 === Working memory is a temporary storage and information manipulation system during cognitive work or mental activation (Baddeley, 2003, Baddeley & Hitch, 1974). The issue of what influences working memory capacity is worth examining. So far, there are two accounts about the reason why working memory performance varies. One is the time-base decay theory (Barrouillet et al., 2001; 2004), and another one is the interference-based theory (Oberauer & Lewandowsky, 2008, Saito & Miyake, 2004). In present study, the generation tasks were adopted in the working memory procedure for the first time. The generation task was shown to improve short-term storage (Slamecka & Graf, 1978). However, there were no studies carried out this task with working memory''s complex tasks. Though the generation improved memory storage, it demanded longer time and more resource to produce an item. For this reason, the generation task can help us to understand whether it is interference or time decay that effects working memory performance. In the present experiments, working memory performance was worse if the items are independent of generation task and if items were participants self-generated, the performance was equal to the items simply read once. As the results showed, generation tasks could enhance the working memory performance. However, the motion of generating made interference much more than read that would reduce the capacity. The present study supports the interference-based theory. The processes induce interference that causes variation of working memory performance. The author discusses the implications of present results, suggesting that the time-based decay is not the main factor that influences working memory capacity.
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