scholarly journals Questioning short-term memory and its measurement: Why digit span measures long-term associative learning

Cognition ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 144 ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Jones ◽  
Bill Macken
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Kimel ◽  
Itay Lieder ◽  
Merav Ahissar

AbstractDyslexia, defined as a specific impairment in decoding the written script, is the most widespread learning difficulty. However, individuals with dyslexia (IDDs) also consistently manifest reduced short-term memory (STM) capacity, typically measured by Digit Span or non-word repetition tasks. In this paper we report two experiments which test the effect of item frequency and the effect of a repeated sequence on the performance in STM tasks in good readers and in IDDs. IDDs’ performance benefited less from item frequency, revealing poor use of long-term single item statistics. This pattern suggests that the amply reported shorter verbal spans in dyslexia may in fact reflect their impaired sensitivity to items’ long-term frequency. For repeated sequence learning, we found no significant deficit among IDDs, even when a sensitive paradigm and a robust measure were used.


Author(s):  
Atikarn Phrukphicharn ◽  

Number of studies reveals that music has an impact on human’s brain and mostly helps us to memorize things. These studies only aim for influences of music on long-term memory helping people to memorize and recalling their recollection better. However, no research nor study regarding effects of music on short-term memory has been conducted. In a very short period, whether hearing music might ruin concentration rather than enhancing attentiveness for the efficiency of memorizing or not. If not, which type of music or sound is more capable in increasing the ability to memorize. These questions lead us to develop online tests (https://lookchinandthegang.wixsite.com/my-site) by using Digit Span Test as a prototype. The tests were adapted to suit our research questions more completely. Several types of background sound were involved in the tests including metronome (100 BPM), alpha wave which people widely use to play in the background while reading, and silent mode. Test takers are a group of teenagers (between 16 and 25 years old) in Thailand. The results illustrate that the average score and the rate of participants’ opinion are nearly identical. Thus, listening to sound while doing the test does not contribute an increase in the efficiency of memorization of participants. Moreover, type of sound is that best to magnify the participants’ ability cannot be identified since there are several opinions regarding listening to sound while doing the test either enhancing the efficiency to memorizing (positive effect) or decreasing the ability of participants to recognize (negative effect) or, indeed, has no impact (neutral effect). To conclude, listening to sound could help increase the effectiveness of short-term memory or not is based on preference of the individuals.


2016 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary C. Potter

AbstractRapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of words or pictured scenes provides evidence for a large-capacity conceptual short-term memory (CSTM) that momentarily provides rich associated material from long-term memory, permitting rapid chunking (Potter 1993; 2009; 2012). In perception of scenes as well as language comprehension, we make use of knowledge that briefly exceeds the supposed limits of working memory.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 710-727
Author(s):  
Beula M. Magimairaj ◽  
Naveen K. Nagaraj ◽  
Alexander V. Sergeev ◽  
Natalie J. Benafield

Objectives School-age children with and without parent-reported listening difficulties (LiD) were compared on auditory processing, language, memory, and attention abilities. The objective was to extend what is known so far in the literature about children with LiD by using multiple measures and selective novel measures across the above areas. Design Twenty-six children who were reported by their parents as having LiD and 26 age-matched typically developing children completed clinical tests of auditory processing and multiple measures of language, attention, and memory. All children had normal-range pure-tone hearing thresholds bilaterally. Group differences were examined. Results In addition to significantly poorer speech-perception-in-noise scores, children with LiD had reduced speed and accuracy of word retrieval from long-term memory, poorer short-term memory, sentence recall, and inferencing ability. Statistically significant group differences were of moderate effect size; however, standard test scores of children with LiD were not clinically poor. No statistically significant group differences were observed in attention, working memory capacity, vocabulary, and nonverbal IQ. Conclusions Mild signal-to-noise ratio loss, as reflected by the group mean of children with LiD, supported the children's functional listening problems. In addition, children's relative weakness in select areas of language performance, short-term memory, and long-term memory lexical retrieval speed and accuracy added to previous research on evidence-based areas that need to be evaluated in children with LiD who almost always have heterogenous profiles. Importantly, the functional difficulties faced by children with LiD in relation to their test results indicated, to some extent, that commonly used assessments may not be adequately capturing the children's listening challenges. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12808607


1978 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-148
Author(s):  
Mary Anne Herndon

In a model of the functioning of short term memory, the encoding of information for subsequent storage in long term memory is simulated. In the encoding process, semantically equivalent paragraphs are detected for recombination into a macro information unit. This recombination process can be used to relieve the limited storage capacity constraint of short term memory and subsequently increase processing efficiency. The results of the simulation give a favorable indication of the success for the use of cluster analysis as a tool to simulate the encoding function in the detection of semantically similar paragraphs.


2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 172988141769231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ning An ◽  
Shi-Ying Sun ◽  
Xiao-Guang Zhao ◽  
Zeng-Guang Hou

Visual tracking is a challenging computer vision task due to the significant observation changes of the target. By contrast, the tracking task is relatively easy for humans. In this article, we propose a tracker inspired by the cognitive psychological memory mechanism, which decomposes the tracking task into sensory memory register, short-term memory tracker, and long-term memory tracker like humans. The sensory memory register captures information with three-dimensional perception; the short-term memory tracker builds the highly plastic observation model via memory rehearsal; the long-term memory tracker builds the highly stable observation model via memory encoding and retrieval. With the cooperative models, the tracker can easily handle various tracking scenarios. In addition, an appearance-shape learning method is proposed to update the two-dimensional appearance model and three-dimensional shape model appropriately. Extensive experimental results on a large-scale benchmark data set demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art two-dimensional and three-dimensional trackers in terms of efficiency, accuracy, and robustness.


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