| Popis: |
It has often been suggested that verbal short-term memory, the ability to maintain verbal information for a brief period of time, is based on the upload of to-be-remembered material into passive, dedicated, information stores. Alternatively, it has been claimed that all information is remembered but that access to it gets obstructed because of interference by subsequent similar material. The aim of this chapter is to present both approaches and to examine the viability of a different, perceptual-gestural, view of information buffering over the short term. This approach conceptualizes verbal short-term storage as an active process that emerges from, and is defined by, the recruitment of receptive and (speech) productive mechanisms. Experimental results actually suggest an active involvement of productive mechanisms. These experiments also cast doubt on the proposal that forgetting occurs because of interference by similar content. Another experiment expands upon this challenge of the interference-based view by showing that a temporary lesion of a brain area involved in speech planning (Broca’s area) affects verbal short-term memory performance in the absence of any additional potentially interfering verbal input. Further, challenging the store-based view, the virtual lesion of Broca’s area also attenuated the phonological similarity effect, a hallmark effect of the function of the hypothetical language-independent store. Finally, based on further experiments, it is concluded that only the perceptual-gestural approach can offer an account of presentation-type-based differences in verbal list recall that goes beyond a redescription of the observed effects. |
