Failing to remember the source of retrievable information is known as source amnesia. This phenomenon has been extensively investigated in long-term memory but rarely in working memory, as we share the intuition that the source information of an item that we have encountered in the immediate past is always available. However, a recent study (Chen, Carlson, & Wyble, 2018) challenged this common sense by showing the source amnesia for simple visual stimuli (e.g., colored square) in the context of working memory when participants did not expect having to report source information, which indicated that the source information of visual stimuli was not automatically encoded into working memory. The current study sought to further examine this newly discovered phenomenon by testing whether it persists with complex and meaningful stimuli in the visual modality (Experiments 1, 4a & 4b), cross-visual-and-auditory modalities (Experiments 2a & 2b), and within-auditory modality (Experiment 3). Interestingly, the results revealed that short-term source amnesia was a robust effect in the visual modality even for complex and meaningful stimuli, whereas it was absent in the cross-visual-and-auditory or within-auditory modalities, regardless of reporting expectation. This indicates differences in working memory representations of visual and auditory stimuli, namely, the representation of auditory stimuli was stored together with the corresponding original sources, while that of visual stimuli was stored independently of its source information. These findings have crucial implications for further clarifying the longstanding debate regarding whether or not there is a modality-independent working memory storage system for different modalities.

中文翻译：

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源信息固有地与用于听觉的工作记忆表示相关联，但与视觉刺激无关。

无法记住可检索信息的来源称为来源失忆症。这种现象已在长期记忆中进行了广泛研究，但在工作记忆中却很少进行，因为我们有一种直觉，即我们在最近遇到的项目的源信息始终可用。然而，最近的一项研究（Chen，Carlson，＆Wyble，2018）通过在工作记忆的背景下显示简单的视觉刺激（例如彩色正方形）的源性失忆症来挑战这一常识，而参与者并不希望不得不报告源信息，表明视觉刺激的源信息并未自动编码到工作记忆中。当前的研究试图通过测试该现象是否在视觉模态（实验1、4a和4b），跨视觉和听觉模态（实验2a和2b）以及复杂且有意义的刺激下持续存在，来进一步检查这一现象。听觉内模态（实验3）。有趣的是，结果表明，即使对于复杂而有意义的刺激，短期源性健忘症在视觉模态中也具有强大的作用，而在跨视觉和听觉或听觉内的模式中却没有，无论报告的期望如何。这表明视觉和听觉刺激的工作记忆表示形式存在差异，即听觉刺激的表示形式与相应的原始来源一起存储，而视觉刺激的存储与其来源信息无关。这些发现对于进一步澄清关于是否存在针对不同模式的与模式无关的工作记忆存储系统的长期辩论具有至关重要的意义。