scholarly journals Verbal Working Memory, Long-Term Knowledge, and Statistical Learning

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 340-345
Author(s):  
Satoru Saito ◽  
Masataka Nakayama ◽  
Yuki Tanida

Evidence supporting the idea that serial-order verbal working memory is underpinned by long-term knowledge has accumulated over more than half a century. Recent studies using natural-language statistics, artificial statistical-learning techniques, and the Hebb repetition paradigm have revealed multiple types of long-term knowledge underlying serial-order verbal working memory performance. These include (a) element-to-element association knowledge, which slowly accumulates through extensive exposure to an exemplar; (b) position–element knowledge, which is acquired through several encounters with an exemplar; and (c) whole-sequence knowledge, which is captured by the Hebb repetition paradigm and acquired rapidly with a few repetitions. Arguably, the first two are a basis for fluent and efficient language usage, and the third is a basis for vocabulary learning. Thus, statistical-learning mechanisms (and possibly episodic-learning mechanisms) may form the foundation of language acquisition and language processing, which characterize linguistic long-term knowledge for verbal working memory.

Author(s):  
Ian Neath ◽  
Jean Saint-Aubin ◽  
Tamra J. Bireta ◽  
Andrew J. Gabel ◽  
Chelsea G. Hudson ◽  
...  

NeuroImage ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 1000-1008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xingchang Wei ◽  
Seung-Schik Yoo ◽  
Chandlee C. Dickey ◽  
Kelly H. Zou ◽  
Charles R.G. Guttmann ◽  
...  

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (5) ◽  
pp. 1541-1553 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucie Attout ◽  
Laura Ordonez Magro ◽  
Arnaud Szmalec ◽  
Steve Majerus

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hayden Schill ◽  
Jeremy Wolfe ◽  
Timothy F. Brady

Memory capacity depends on prior knowledge, both in working memory and in long-term memory. For example, radiologists have improved long-term memory for medical images compared to novices. Furthermore, people tend to remember abnormal or surprising items best. This is often claimed to arise primarily because such items attract additional attention at encoding. How do expertise and abnormality interact when experts are actively searching for abnormalities; e.g. radiologists looking at mammograms? In the current work, we investigate whether expert radiologists (N=32) show improved memory performance for abnormal images compared to novice participants (N=60). We consider two types of “abnormality.” A mammogram can have a focal abnormality that can be localized or it could simply be the mammogram of a woman known to have cancer (e.g. the image of the breast contralateral to the focal abnormality). Must an image have a focal abnormality for additional attentional processing to be engaged? We found that experts have better memory for mammograms than novice participants and enhanced memory for abnormal images relative to normal images. Overall, radiologists showed no memory benefit for the contralateral-abnormal images and did not discriminate them from normal images, but had enhanced memory for images with focal abnormalities. Our results suggest that focal abnormalities play an important role in enhancing memory of expert observers.


2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (6) ◽  
pp. 1440-1456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phillip L Morgan ◽  
Craig Williams ◽  
Fay M Ings ◽  
Nia C Hughes

Two experiments examined if exposure to emotionally valent image-based secondary tasks introduced at different points of a free recall working memory (WM) task impair memory performance. Images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) varied in the degree of negative or positive valance (mild, moderate, strong) and were positioned at low, moderate and high WM load points with participants rating them based upon perceived valence. As predicted, and based on previous research and theory, the higher the degree of negative (Experiment 1) and positive (Experiment 2) valence and the higher the WM load when a secondary task was introduced, the greater the impairment to recall. Secondary task images with strong negative valance were more disruptive than negative images with lower valence at moderate and high WM load task points involving encoding and/or rehearsal of primary task words (Experiment 1). This was not the case for secondary tasks involving positive images (Experiment 2), although participant valence ratings for positive IAPS images classified as moderate and strong were in fact very similar. Implications are discussed in relation to research and theory on task interruption and attentional narrowing and literature concerning the effects of emotive stimuli on cognition.


Author(s):  
Thomas Jacobsen ◽  
Erich Schröger

Abstract. Working memory uses central sound representations as an informational basis. The central sound representation is the temporally and feature-integrated mental representation that corresponds to phenomenal perception. It is used in (higher-order) mental operations and stored in long-term memory. In the bottom-up processing path, the central sound representation can be probed at the level of auditory sensory memory with the mismatch negativity (MMN) of the event-related potential. The present paper reviews a newly developed MMN paradigm to tap into the processing of speech sound representations. Preattentive vowel categorization based on F1-F2 formant information occurs in speech sounds and complex tones even under conditions of high variability of the auditory input. However, an additional experiment demonstrated the limits of the preattentive categorization of language-relevant information. It tested whether the system categorizes complex tones containing the F1 and F2 formant components of the vowel /a/ differently than six sounds with nonlanguage-like F1-F2 combinations. From the absence of an MMN in this experiment, it is concluded that no adequate vowel representation was constructed. This shows limitations of the capability of preattentive vowel categorization.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document