An Empirical Study On Attention’s Impact On Short-Term Memory In Cconsecutive Interpreting

This thesis is an empirical study trying to explore from the perspective of cognitive psychology how Kahneman’s four Attention factors,namely,enduring dispositions,momentary intentions,evaluation of demands on capacity required to complete the task(i.e.,the ability to understand the task)and effects of arousal,affect the quality of shortterm memory in Chinese-English consecutive interpreting,finding out which Attention factor affects short-term memory the most/least.This experiment invites 10 students to participate.Firstly,each participant listens to two excerpted audio files and completes the consecutive interpretation in order while the whole process is recorded.The total listening duration is controlled within 2 minutes and the difficulty of materials is the same as that of the CATTI 2 Test.Before interpreting,each participant is told about the theme of the materials to be heard.Then,each participant needs to fill in a questionnaire about their personal feelings when interpreting,the questionnaire regarding the four Attention factors discussed in Kahneman’s Capacity Model and the hypotheses put forward in this thesis.At last,each participant listens to their own interpretation,recalls and marks the chunks that they misinterpret but can memorize.Quality of short-term memory in this thesis refers to the ratio of the chunks that can be memorized in ±1 minute,and the quantity of the chunks that can be memorized in ±1 minute is composed of “the quantity of the chunks correctly interpreted” and “the quantity of the chunks that are misinterpreted but can be memorized” in ±1 minute.After calculation and correlation analysis,based on the analysis results the following conclusion has been made: 1)When more contents in the material make the participant feel novel and surprised,the short-term memory quality would be lower.2)When more contents are needed to be differentiated and analyzed,the short-term memory quality would not always be lower.3)When more contents in the material make the participant difficult to understand,the short-term memory quality would be lower.4)When the participant is less nervous,the short-term memory quality would not always be higher.5)The short-term memory quality is most affected by the participant’s evaluation of his energy required to complete the task/his ability to understand the texts.