Lecture 4

Question 1

What is the rationale behind the VPC task and other paradigms based on habituation?

Answer 1

Assumption that infants will continue to look at a stimulus until it is fully encoded, at which point attention will be shifted toward novel information in the surrounding environment

Question 2

Newborn visual fixation is believed to be primarily

involuntary - what is it controlled by?

Answer 2

A reflexive system

Question 3

what shows considerable development from 3-6 months of age?

Answer 3

Posterior orienting system involved in the voluntary
control of eye movements

• due to synaptic pruning

Question 4

What was Oakes et al (2013) investigating?

Answer 4

Development of WM during 6-8 months

Question 5

Explain the design of Oakes et al (2013) experiment

Answer 5

Half a second showing 2 squares, then then blank screen, then show one familiar one is novel square

Fully encoded the first array, they will be more driven to the novel square as they haven’t seen before

Question 6

What were Oakes et al (2013) findings?

Answer 6

Difference between 6 and 8 months,

8 months could recognise difference, 6 months could do that too but only limited to one object

Question 7

What were Courage et al (2006) investigating?

Answer 7

0-12 months WM

Question 8

Explain the Courage et al (2006) experiment

Answer 8

In this paradigm presented with 3 different types of stimuli

• Basic geometric pattern
• Still frame from a video of a woman’s face
• A single frame from a sesame street video, visually a lot more complex

Question 9

Findings of Courage et al (2006)

Answer 9

Infant look duration dropped significantly from 3-6 months of age (14-26 weeks of age)

From 6-12 months:

• Geometric levels out, not much more they can get from it, no meaning
• Faces increases then plateaus
• Sesame spend more and more time fixating before they look away

Question 10

Conclusions from Courage et al (2006)

Answer 10

Significant improvement in these basic WM functions occurs from 5–6 months

Given that several models emphasize some aspect of attentional control as a core component of WM (e.g., central executive) it suggests that the emergence of some rudimentary level of attentional control at around 6 months of age contributes significantly to the development of WM

Question 11

Gathercole, Pickering, Ambridge & Wearing, 2004 Experiment outline

Answer 11

Assessed over 700 children aged between 4 and 15

Used a range of WM measures

Question 12

Why did Gathercole et al (2004) undergo her experiment

Answer 12

She noticed the multiple component model of WM was based on studies of young adults

• This may not correspond to structure of WM during early development

May be single systems at a young age

Question 13

Findings of Gathercole (2004)

Answer 13

WM gets better as you get older (4-15), steadily overtime on a wide range of measures

Question 14

What is the difference between exploratory

and confirmatory factor analysis?

Answer 14

Exploratory factor analysis - don’t know what is going to happen in your data

Confirmatory factor analysis - is theory driven

Question 15

Alloway, Gathercole; Pickering, (2006) - explain the experiment and what their speculation was with regard to develop WM system vs developing

Answer 15

speculated if the separation of memory tasks was was influential in younger developing brains

Administered extensive battery of different types of tests for children across different ages examining visual and verbal

Question 16

Findings of Alloway et al (2006)

Answer 16

Confirmatory factor analyses indicated that WM is divided into three components corresponding to the phonological loop, the visuospatial sketchpad and the central executive in children across a range of ages

This model is largely stable across this developmental
period. The data also suggest that all WM components are in place by 4.

Question 17

Conclusions of Gathercole et al (2004)

Answer 17

There is evidence that the functional organisation of WM corresponds to the major components of the WM model (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974) from age 4–6 years in typically developing children

No difference in age

Question 18

What did Hackman et al (2015) investigate and how?

Answer 18

The impact of SES on WM development

More than 300, 10-13-year-olds was followed over
the course of four years

Measured SES on fam environment and wide social context

Each year children completed a set of WM tests

Question 19

What did Hackman (2015) find?

Answer 19

Parents’ level of education, but NOT neighborhood
characteristics, was associated with working memory
skills

– Because WM is closely linked to learning, parental
education is likely to be a good predictor of children’s
academic success

Question 20

Why might parental education lead to better WM skills

Answer 20

Better educated parents would be more likely to have books at home, museums etc homing in WM skills at a young age

Question 21

Is Poor WM recognized as a developmental disorder

Answer 21

No

Question 22

WM impairments are associated with below or above average IQ?

Answer 22

below-average

Question 23

WM is a key marker of a number of developmental disorders of learning such as (Alloway and Gathercole, 2006)

Answer 23

• Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
• Dyslexia, dyscalculia
  – Specific language impairment (SLI)
  – Genetic pathologies (e.g., Down syndrome, William’s syndrome)

Question 24

According to Alloway and Gathercole (2006) in a typical class of 30 children how many will be above an below average

Answer 24

10% above and 10% below, large differences!

Question 25

What are the five characteristics of children with poor WM? Gathercole and Alloway (2008)

Answer 25

- Poor academic progress: 80% risk - Problems combining processing and storage - Place-keeping difficulties - Behaviour: short attention span, highly distractible - Difficulties in following instructions

Question 26

Why are WM profiles provide important clues to the underlying cause of the deficit but are not in themselves sufficient to pinpoint the core deficit

Answer 26

This is because WM is an integral part of a broader cognitive system, E.G. – Phonological processing deficits in SLI and dyslexia (Bishop &; Snowling, 2004) – Impairments in WM, planning, and response inhibition in ADHD (Willcutt et al., 2005)

Question 27

Can you name the three principal methods to reduce the difficulties that arise from poor WM? (Holmes, Gathercole and Dunning 2010)

Answer 27

1) Classroom based support 2) Strategy training 3) Adaptive training regimes

Question 28

Explain how classroom based support can reduce the difficulties that arise from poor WM?

Answer 28

Adapt the child’s environment to minimize WM loads and facilitate classroom learning

Question 29

Explain how strategy training can reduce the difficulties that arise from poor WM?

Answer 29

Encourage children to use effective mnemonic strategies that might relieve the pressure on relatively low memory capacities

Question 30

Explain how Adaptive training regimes can reduce the difficulties that arise from poor WM?

Answer 30

Directly training working | memory through repeated practice on WM tasks that adapt continuously to maintain challenge

Question 31

What are 2 aspects of interventions that make them more useful?

Answer 31

Training effects must not be the result of task specific strategies that lead only to improvements on other WM tasks Training benefits should generalize to other measures of cognitive and academic functioning

Question 32

What is the difference between ‘near’ and | ‘far’ transfer effects?

Answer 32

Near-transfer effects - improvements in performance on tasks that are similar to the training tasks Far-transfer effects - improvements in performance on tasks which are largely dissimilar to the training tasks

Question 33

What is the difference between ‘adaptive’ | and ‘non-adaptive’ WM training?

Answer 33

adaptive - gets increasingly difficult as they get better

Question 34

Can you summarise the design and key findings reported by Klingberg, Forssberg, &; Westerberg (2002)? An issue of this study

Answer 34

aim: to identify changes in brain activity associated with the increase in working memory (WM) capacity that occurs during childhood and early adulthood. Functional MRI (fMRI) was used to measure brain activity in subjects between 9 and 18 years of age while they performed a visuospatial WM task and a baseline task. Older children showed higher activation of cortex in the superior frontal and intraparietal cortex than the younger children did. WM capacity was significantly correlated with brain activity in the same regions - known to be involved in the control of attention and spatial WM. The development of the functionality in these areas may play an important role in cognitive development during childhood. Issue: Only 7 participants

Question 35

Can you summarise the design and key findings reported by Jaeggi et al. (2008)?

Answer 35

2 continuous streams of info trained on - auditory and visual Transfer from training on a demanding working memory task to measures of general intelligence - dosage-dependen

Question 36

Can you summarise the design and key findings reported by Klingberg, Forssberg, & Westerberg (2002)? An issue of this study

Answer 36

Studied children with ADHD Adaptive competitive game 30-40 mins a day for 20 days Training significantly enhanced performance on the trained WM tasks. More importantly, the training significantly improved performance on far transfer tasks Issue: Only 7 participants

Question 37

Can you summarise the design and key findings reported by Holmes et al (2009)?

Answer 37

Worked with children with poor WMC Tested on ALMA - automated working memory acceptance Tested before training, after training and 6 months after Findings: - Still better than the group that did none adaptive training after 6 months - All near transfer effects

Question 38

Can you summarise the design and key findings reported by Redick et al (2013)?

Answer 38

Review: showing no evidence of WM training improvement Turns out the people were taken from different studies, weren't part of the same paradigm, wasn’t one person - When you look at it separating as it should be properly looked at sig improvement isn't seen

Question 39

What is the design of a randomised placebo-controlled study?

Answer 39

in addition to a group of subjects that receives the treatment to be evaluated, a separate control group receives a sham "placebo" treatment which is specifically designed to have no real effect

Question 40

What did Astle, Barnes, Baker, Colclough, &; Woolrich (2015) find?

Answer 40

Can replicate near transfer but can't for far transfer effects cognitive training augments intrinsic neurophysiological brain connectivity in childhood at rest (therefore not due to motivation). Not promising results for adults.

Question 41

Who had reservations that the multicomponent model was not applicable for 4-6 year olds?

Answer 41

Swanson (2008)