Strategy Use on Clinical Administrations of Short-Term and Working Memory Tasks

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (8) ◽  
pp. 954-968 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela M. AuBuchon ◽  
William G. Kronenberger ◽  
Lindsay Stone ◽  
David B. Pisoni
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Serial Recall ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Strategy Use ◽  
Lexical Knowledge ◽  
Immediate Serial Recall ◽  
Line Drawings ◽  
Backward Recall ◽  
Span Tasks

Experimental measures of working memory that minimize rehearsal and maximize attentional control best predict higher-order cognitive abilities. These tasks fundamentally differ from clinically administered span tasks, which do not control strategy use. Participants engaged in concurrent articulation (to limit rehearsal) or concurrent tapping (to limit attentional refreshing) during forward and backward serial recall with each of three distinct stimulus sets: digits, line drawings of common objects, and images of nonsense symbols. The span tasks used common clinical stopping and scoring procedures. Scores were highest for digits and lowest for novel symbols in all combinations of direction and concurrent task. Furthermore, concurrent articulation and concurrent tapping interfered with backward recall to the same degree. Together, these findings indicate that clinically administered immediate serial recall tasks depend on both rehearsal and long-term lexical knowledge making it difficult to use these tasks to separate problems in language ability from problems in attention.

Towards a Theory of Working Memory

2020 ◽  
pp. 116-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Oberauer
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Computational Models ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Reproduction Task ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Immediate Serial Recall ◽  
Span Tasks ◽  
Task Sets ◽  
And Task

Working memory provides a medium for building and manipulating new representations that control our thoughts and actions. To fulfil this function, a working memory system needs to meet six requirements: (1) it must have a mechanism for rapidly forming temporary bindings to combine elements into new structures; (2) it needs a focus of attention for selectively accessing individual elements for processing; (3) it must hold both declarative representations of what is the case, and procedural representations of how to act on the current situation; (4) it needs a process for rapid updating, including rapid removal of outdated contents. Moreover, contents of working memory (5) need to be shielded from interference from long-term memory, while (6) working memory should be able to use information in long-term memory when it is useful. This chapter summarizes evidence in support of these mechanisms and processes. It presents three computational models that each implement some of these mechanisms, and explains different subsets of empirical findings about working memory: the SOB-CS model accounts for behaviour in tests of immediate serial recall, including complex-span tasks. The interference model explains data from a common test of visual working memory, the continuous-reproduction task. The set-selection model explains how people learn memory sets and task sets, how these sets are retrieved from long-term memory, and how these mechanisms enable switching between memory sets and task sets.

Memory for Related and Unrelated Words: Further Evidence on the Influence of Semantic Factors in Immediate Serial Recall

1995 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 384-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Poirier ◽  
Jean Saint-Aubin
Keyword(s):  
Serial Recall ◽  
Articulatory Suppression ◽  
Memory Span ◽  
Recall Performance ◽  
Semantic Category ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Homogeneous Condition ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Immediate Serial Recall

A number of recent studies have explored the role of long-term memory factors in memory span tasks. The effects of lexicality, frequency, imageability, and word class have been investigated. The work reported in this paper examined the effect of semantic organization on the recall of short lists of words. Specifically, the influence of semantic category on immediate serial recall and the interaction of this variable with articulatory suppression was investigated in three experiments. Experiment 1 compared immediate serial recall performance when lists comprising items from the same semantic category were used (homogeneous condition) with a situation where lists held items from different semantic categories. Experiment 2 examined the same conditions with and without articulatory suppression during item presentation, and Experiment 3 reproduced these conditions with suppression occurring throughout presentation and recall. Results of all three experiments showed a clear advantage for the homogeneous condition. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that the homogeneous category advantage did not depend on the articulatory loop. Furthermore, error analysis indicated that this effect was mainly attributable to better item information recall for the homogeneous condition. These results are interpreted as reflecting a long-term memory contribution to the recall stage of immediate serial recall tasks.

Interaction Between Working Memory and Long-Term Memory

2014 ◽  
Vol 222 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klara Marton ◽  
Naomi Eichorn
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Task Complexity ◽  
Memory Performance ◽  
Poor Performance ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Span Tasks

Individual differences in working memory have been related to interactions between working memory and long-term memory (LTM). The present study examined this interaction in children with and without language impairment. We used two listening span tasks and two nonword repetition tasks. The results suggest a strong interaction among age, language status, and task complexity. Children with specific language impairment showed consistently poor performance across tasks and indicated a weakness in using long-term knowledge to support working memory performance. The findings show that these children do not benefit from various manipulations designed to enhance working memory performance via LTM support due to a combination of inefficiencies in maintaining and updating items in working memory and retrieving information from LTM, in part because of their poor resistance to interference.

How Does Semantic Knowledge Impact Working Memory Maintenance? Computational and Behavioral Investigations

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Kowialiewski ◽  
Sophie Portrat ◽  
Benoit Lemaire
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Semantic Relatedness ◽  
Semantic Knowledge ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Immediate Serial Recall ◽  
Serial Recall Task ◽  
Memory Knowledge ◽  
Tree Branch

It is now firmly established that long-term memory knowledge, such as semantic knowledge, supports the temporary maintenance of verbal information in Working Memory (WM). This support from semantic knowledge is well-explained by models assuming that verbal items are directly activated in long-term memory, and that this activation provides the representational basis for WM maintenance. However, the exact mechanisms underlying semantic influence on WM performance remain poorly understood. We manipulated the presence of between-item semantic relatedness in an immediate serial recall task, by mixing triplets composed of semantically related and unrelated items (e.g. leaf – tree – branch – wall – beer – dog; hand – father – truck – cloud – sky – rain). Compared to unrelated items, related items were better recalled, as had been classically observed. Critically, semantic relatedness also impacted WM maintenance in a complex manner, as observed by the presence of proactive benefit effects on subsequent unrelated items, and the absence of retroactive effects. The complexity of these interactions is well-captured by TBRS*-S, a decay-based computational architecture in which the activation occurring in long-term memory is described. The present study suggests that semantic knowledge can be used to free up WM resources that can be reallocated for maintenance purposes, and supports models postulating that long-term memory knowledge constrains WM maintenance processes.

scholarly journals SKOOL versus ZOOL: Effects of orthographic and phonological long-term memory on nonword immediate serial recall

Memory ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 487-500 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy J. Tree ◽  
Chris Longmore ◽  
Steve Majerus ◽  
Nicky Evans
Keyword(s):  
Serial Recall ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Immediate Serial Recall

scholarly journals Visuospatial Bootstrapping

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Darling ◽  
Richard J. Allen ◽  
Jelena Havelka
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Serial Recall ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Cognitive Systems ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Single Location

Visuospatial bootstrapping is the name given to a phenomenon whereby performance on visually presented verbal serial-recall tasks is better when stimuli are presented in a spatial array rather than a single location. However, the display used has to be a familiar one. This phenomenon implies communication between cognitive systems involved in storing short-term memory for verbal and visual information, alongside connections to and from knowledge held in long-term memory. Bootstrapping is a robust, replicable phenomenon that should be incorporated in theories of working memory and its interaction with long-term memory. This article provides an overview of bootstrapping, contextualizes it within research on links between long-term knowledge and short-term memory, and addresses how it can help inform current working memory theory.

Training Working Memory for 100 Days

2019 ◽  
pp. 40-57
Author(s):  
Florian Schmiedek ◽  
Martin Lövdén ◽  
Ulman Lindenberger
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
Self Concept ◽  
Transfer Effects ◽  
Latent Factors ◽  
Younger Adults ◽  
Cognitive Plasticity ◽  
Key Features

This chapter is based on a theoretical framework for the study of adult cognitive plasticity and on empirical findings from the COGITO Study. The design and analyses of the study include key features for producing and detecting transfer effects at the level of cognitive abilities. Among the features are: (a) an intensity and dosage of training that is likely to induce an enduring mismatch between functional supply and demand, which is conducive to plastic changes in cognitive abilities, and (b) a multivariate and heterogeneous battery of transfer tasks and sufficiently large samples to allow for the investigation of transfer of training at the level of latent factors. Younger adults showed short-term and long-term transfer effects for reasoning and episodic memory, whereas older adults showed only short-term transfer on a working memory (WM) latent factor composed of tasks that resembled the practiced tasks, something that younger adults did as well. The chapter discusses possible interpretations of the findings in terms of increases in WM capacity, improvements in the efficiency of material-independent or material-specific processes or strategies, and improvements in motivation and self-concept.

Working memory span for pictures, names, and touched objects

2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (0) ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Alexandra M. Fernandes ◽  
Pedro B. Albuquerque
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Serial Recall ◽  
Articulatory Suppression ◽  
Memory Span ◽  
Recall Performance ◽  
Presentation Modality ◽  
Immediate Serial Recall ◽  
Computer Screen ◽  
Real Objects ◽  
The Impact

Through an immediate serial recall task, working memory for objects’ pictures, objects’ names and touched objects was evaluated with and without a simultaneous articulatory suppression task. Each group performed the task in one modality: seeing object pictures presented on a computer screen, reading out loud two-syllabic object names presented in a computer screen, or touching real objects without sight. The task was performed twice by the participants, once with articulatory suppression and once without articulatory suppression. The objects were presented sequentially for three seconds each, starting with lists of two items and progressively increasing the number of items by one, according to the participant’s performance, until a maximum of 10 items. The results showed that span values were similar in the three modalities, with an average of five items being recalled without articulatory suppression and about four items being recalled with articulatory suppression. This study suggests similar performance in immediate serial recall tasks regardless of presentation modality. Articulatory suppression presented an equivalent effect in all groups, impairing recall performance in average by one item. Results are discussed attending to the verbal nature of the task, which implies the recall of the object’s name, and the impact of articulatory suppression in common object’s encoding.

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