The Impact Of Proactive Interference In Visual Working Memory

Working memory is a part of the human memory system that serves cognition by maintaining temporary information in an active state. Its limited capacity is thought to constrain performance in activities such as reading, reasoning and mental calculation. Proactive interference affects the capacity of working memory and important to high cognitive abilities. Proactive interference usually arises when participants are confused about whether an item was presented on the current trial or on a previous trial, and the effect is more obvious as the similarity of the items between the current trial and the previous trial is higher. Since individuals experience reaction of attitude and behavior in the process of studying, and the content which has emotional meaning influences the recall effects, emotion is also an important factor when we study memory.This research chose41female students from the university as subjects, using recent-probes task test the mechanism of proactive interference appearance in visual working memory. The stimulus of the experiments are from Chinese characters which have emotional and non-emotional meanings.This research is divided into two experiments, using emotional meaning characters and non-emotional meaning characters as stimuli respectively. In the emotional character experiment, we used recent-probes task by dividing the experiment into10blocks, each block contains8trials. In every trial, we chose3Chinese characters from frequency stage1or frequency stage5. The test array was the same to the sample array, or there was one character in the test array different from in the sample array. The subjects needed to response whether the test array changed or not by pressing the button. The purpose of this experiment is to know whether the complexity of experiment material is one of the reasons that generate proactive interference under non-emotional conditions. In the emotional character experiment, we only changed the characters which are used in the non-emotional character experiment. The purpose of the experiment is to observe whether proactive interference would appear under emotion-eliciting situation. The result shows,1. There is no proactive interference effect in the condition of short array duration by using non-emotional characters, so the appearance of proactive interference is related to the length of array duration, and no connections with the material complexity;2. In emotion-eliciting situation, proactive interference appears although the sample duration is short.To conclude the results of these two experiments, we suggested that, the array duration is one reason that could decide whether there is proactive interference; With the short array duration, emotion could result in proactive interference effect, and it also influence the capacity of visual working memory.