Short-term storage is a stable predictor of fluid intelligence whereas working memory capacity and executive function are not: A comprehensive study with Iranian schoolchildren

Intelligence ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 134-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seyed Rouhollah Shahabi ◽  
Francisco J. Abad ◽  
Roberto Colom
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Executive Function ◽  
Fluid Intelligence ◽  
Working Memory Capacity ◽  
Memory Capacity ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Short Term Storage ◽  
Term Storage ◽  
Comprehensive Study

scholarly journals The electrophysiological underpinnings of variation in verbal working memory capacity

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuri G. Pavlov ◽  
Boris Kotchoubey
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Individual Differences ◽  
Working Memory Capacity ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Verbal Working Memory ◽  
Beta Activity ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Average Complexity ◽  
Short Term Storage ◽  
Term Storage

Abstract Working memory (WM) consists of short-term storage and executive components. We studied cortical oscillatory correlates of these two components in a large sample of 156 participants to assess separately the contribution of them to individual differences in WM. The participants were presented with WM tasks of above-average complexity. Some of the tasks required only storage in WM, others required storage and mental manipulations. Our data indicate a close relationship between frontal midline theta, central beta activity and the executive components of WM. The oscillatory counterparts of the executive components were associated with individual differences in verbal WM performance. In contrast, alpha activity was not related to the individual differences. The results demonstrate that executive components of WM, rather than short-term storage capacity, play the decisive role in individual WM capacity limits.

scholarly journals The electrophysiological underpinnings of variation in verbal working memory capacity

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuri G. Pavlov ◽  
Boris Kotchoubey
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Individual Differences ◽  
Working Memory Capacity ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Verbal Working Memory ◽  
Beta Activity ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Average Complexity ◽  
Short Term Storage ◽  
Term Storage

Working memory (WM) consists of short-term storage and executive components. We studied cortical oscillatory correlates of these two components in a large sample of 156 participants to assess separately the contribution of them to individual differences in WM. The participants were presented with WM tasks of above-average complexity. Some of the tasks required only storage in WM, others required storage and mental manipulations. Our data indicate a close relationship between frontal midline theta, central beta activity and the executive components of WM. The oscillatory counterparts of the executive components were associated with individual differences in verbal WM performance. In contrast, alpha activity was not related to the individual differences. The results demonstrate that executive components of WM, rather than short-term storage capacity, play the decisive role in individual WM capacity limits.

There is more to fluid intelligence than working memory capacity and executive function

2006 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Garlick ◽  
Terrence J. Sejnowski
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Executive Function ◽  
Fluid Intelligence ◽  
Working Memory Capacity ◽  
Memory Capacity ◽  
Human Intelligence ◽  
Brain Processing

Although working memory capacity and executive function contribute to human intelligence, we question whether there is an equivalence between them and fluid intelligence. We contend that any satisfactory neurobiological explanation of fluid intelligence needs to include abstraction as an important computational component of brain processing.

scholarly journals Is short-term storage correlated with fluid intelligence? Strategy use explains the apparent relationship between ‘number of remembered items’ and fluid intelligence

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zeljana Babic ◽  
Mark Schurgin ◽  
Timothy F. Brady
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Fluid Intelligence ◽  
Storage Capacity ◽  
Memory Performance ◽  
Memory Task ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Structured Representations ◽  
Short Term Storage ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms ◽  
Term Storage

Working memory is a core cognitive system that actively maintains information in an accessible state to support a variety of everyday tasks. Crucially, working memory performance has frequently been shown to strongly correlate with fluid intelligence. Traditionally when these correlations have been observed, the working memory tasks involved required a high degree of manipulation and executive function, as opposed to solely utilizing short-term storage capacity. However, recent work has claimed that simple storage capacity is also correlated with fluid intelligence, and that this is driven by a particularly special and dissociable component of capacity, the ‘number of items represented’ (rather than the precision of those representations). These results have been used to argue that investigating the underlying mechanisms of capacity limitations may be critical to understanding aspects of fluid intelligence. Here we demonstrate that such correlations do not arise solely or primarily from simple storage capacity (nor a single dissociable component of capacity), but are driven by the availability of strategic encoding of different kinds of visual representations. Specifically, a working memory task that decreased the utility of storing and making use of spatial ensemble information, while holding constant the number of items to be remembered and the exact changes participants needed to detect, significantly reduced the correlation between working memory performance and fluid intelligence. Thus, despite being probed on the same items, with the same foils, at the same set size, only working memory displays that allowed for the strategic use of both item and ensemble representations correlated with fluid intelligence. These results provide evidence against the hypothesis that simple storage alone is related to fluid intelligence. They also demonstrate that participants make use of more complex and structured representations rather than solely individual item representation, and that strategic utilization of these representations is what correlates strongly with fluid intelligence.

scholarly journals Working memory as a factor mediating explicit and implicit knowledge of English grammar

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Mirosław Pawlak ◽  
Adriana Biedroń
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Working Memory Capacity ◽  
Memory Capacity ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Passive Voice ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
Explicit And Implicit Knowledge ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This paper reports the findings of a study that investigated the relationship between phonological short-term memory (PSTM), working memory capacity (WMC), and the level of mastery of L2 grammar. Grammatical mastery was operationalized as the ability to produce and comprehend English passive voice with reference to explicit and implicit (or highly automatized) knowledge. Correlational analysis showed that PSTM was related to implicit productive knowledge while WMC was linked to explicit productive knowledge. However, regression analysis showed that those relationships were weak and mediated by overall mastery of target language grammar, operationalized as final grades in a grammar course.

scholarly journals Lower verbalizability of visual stimuli modulates differences in estimates of working memory capacity between children with and without developmental language disorders

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 239694152094551
Author(s):  
Seçkin Arslan ◽  
Lucie Broc ◽  
Fabien Mathy
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Visual Memory ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Working Memory Capacity ◽  
Visual Stimuli ◽  
Memory Capacity ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Short Term

Background and aims Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often perform below their typically developing peers on verbal memory tasks. However, the picture is less clear on visual memory tasks. Research has generally shown that visual memory can be facilitated by verbal representations, but few studies have been conducted using visual materials that are not easy to verbalize. Therefore, we attempted to construct non-verbalizable stimuli to investigate the impact of working memory capacity. Method and results We manipulated verbalizability in visual span tasks and tested whether minimizing verbalizability could help reduce visual recall performance differences across children with and without developmental language disorder. Visuals that could be easily verbalized or not were selected based on a pretest with non-developmental language disorder young adults. We tested groups of children with developmental language disorder (N = 23) and their typically developing peers (N = 65) using these high and low verbalizable classes of visual stimuli. The memory span of the children with developmental language disorder varied across the different stimulus conditions, but critically, although their storage capacity for visual information was virtually unimpaired, the children with developmental language disorder still had difficulty in recalling verbalizable images with simple drawings. Also, recalling complex (galaxy) images with low verbalizability proved difficult in both groups of children. An item-based analysis on correctly recalled items showed that higher levels of verbalizability enhanced visual recall in the typically developing children to a greater extent than the children with developmental language disorder. Conclusions and clinical implication: We suggest that visual short-term memory in typically developing children might be mediated with verbal encoding to a larger extent than in children with developmental language disorder, thus leading to poorer performance on visual capacity tasks. Our findings cast doubts on the idea that short-term storage impairments are limited to the verbal domain, but they also challenge the idea that visual tasks are essentially visual. Therefore, our findings suggest to clinicians working with children experiencing developmental language difficulties that visual memory deficits may not necessarily be due to reduced non-verbal skills but may be due to the high amount of verbal cues in visual stimuli, from which they do not benefit in comparison to their peers.

Understanding the Relationship Between Rationality and Intelligence: A Latent-Variable Approach

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander P. Burgoyne ◽  
Cody Mashburn ◽  
Jason S. Tsukahara ◽  
Zach Hambrick ◽  
Randall W Engle
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Latent Variable ◽  
Fluid Intelligence ◽  
Working Memory Capacity ◽  
Memory Capacity ◽  
Attention Control ◽  
Equation Modeling ◽  
General Intelligence ◽  
Variable Approach ◽  
The Relationship

A hallmark of intelligent behavior is rationality—the disposition and ability to think analytically to make decisions that maximize expected utility or follow the laws of probability, and therefore align with normative principles of decision making. However, the question remains as to whether rationality and intelligence are empirically distinct, as does the question of what cognitive mechanisms underlie individual differences in rationality. In a large sample of participants (N = 331), we used latent variable analyses to assess the relationship between rationality and intelligence. The results indicated that there was a common ability underpinning performance on some, but not all, rationality tests. Latent factors representing rationality and general intelligence were strongly correlated (r = .54), but their correlation fell well short of unity. Indeed, after accounting for variance in performance attributable to general intelligence, rationality measures still cohered on a latent factor. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that rationality correlated significantly with fluid intelligence (r = .56), working memory capacity (r = .44), and attention control (r = .49). Structural equation modeling revealed that attention control fully accounted for the relationship between working memory capacity and rationality, and partially accounted for the relationship between fluid intelligence and rationality. Results are interpreted in light of the executive attention framework, which holds that attention control supports information maintenance and disengagement in service of complex cognition. We conclude by speculating about factors rationality tests may tap that other cognitive ability tests miss, and outline directions for further research.

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