Exploring the influence of time perception on the performance of short-term memory

• Main Authors: Shin-Yu Huang, 黃信毓
• Other Authors: Ming-Chou Ho
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/ddmpb7

碩士 === 中山醫學大學 === 心理學系暨臨床心理學碩士班 === 106 === Short-term memory (STM) is a time-based system. The performance of STM tasks decays as time passes by. In past STM studies, time is usually presumed as “objective”; namely, the delay time in STM tasks is perceived similarly across participants. This study aims to explore whether subjectively perceived delay time can affect STM performance. All the 208 participants recruited in this study are college students at Chung Shan Medical University. The experimental design is divided into three experiments. Experiment 1 (time estimate task) required the participants to estimate various lengths of time (10s,15s,45s,60s,90s), and the most significant estimation errors in duration were chosen as the delay time that used in following experiments. According to the first experiment data, we examined the time estimation range of 10s, 15s, and 45s. Experiment 2 (STM span task) was designed to examine the STM performance under set sizes (more or less) and delay durations (10s, 15s, and 45s). In addition, verbal STM, visual STM, and spatial STM were measured by the following three types of task, namely, digit span task, object span task and matrix span task. Experiment 3 (verbal STM, visual STM, and spatial STM task and time perception judgment task) was designed to explore whether subjectively perceived delay time can affect STM performance. At the end of all the experiments, all data were processed and analyzed by descriptive statistics and ANOVA through IBM SPSS Statistics 20. The result shows that subjectively perceived delay time can affect STM performance. The longer the subjectively perceived delay time is, the lower the accuracy in STM tasks is recorded, while the shorter the subjectively perceived time is, the higher the accuracy can be observed. The current results show that subjectively perceived delay time can affect STM performance, which may shed some light on the future studies of STM.