Lecture 4 Flashcards
What is the rationale behind the VPC task and other paradigms based on habituation?
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
Newborn visual fixation is believed to be primarily
involuntary - what is it controlled by?
A reflexive system
what shows considerable development from 3-6 months of age?
Posterior orienting system involved in the voluntary
control of eye movements
- due to synaptic pruning
What was Oakes et al (2013) investigating?
Development of WM during 6-8 months
Explain the design of Oakes et al (2013) experiment
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
What were Oakes et al (2013) findings?
Difference between 6 and 8 months,
8 months could recognise difference, 6 months could do that too but only limited to one object
What were Courage et al (2006) investigating?
0-12 months WM
Explain the Courage et al (2006) experiment
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
Findings of Courage et al (2006)
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
Conclusions from Courage et al (2006)
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
Gathercole, Pickering, Ambridge & Wearing, 2004 Experiment outline
Assessed over 700 children aged between 4 and 15
Used a range of WM measures
Why did Gathercole et al (2004) undergo her experiment
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
Findings of Gathercole (2004)
WM gets better as you get older (4-15), steadily overtime on a wide range of measures
What is the difference between exploratory
and confirmatory factor analysis?
Exploratory factor analysis - don’t know what is going to happen in your data
Confirmatory factor analysis - is theory driven
Alloway, Gathercole; Pickering, (2006) - explain the experiment and what their speculation was with regard to develop WM system vs developing
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
Findings of Alloway et al (2006)
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.
Conclusions of Gathercole et al (2004)
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
What did Hackman et al (2015) investigate and how?
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
What did Hackman (2015) find?
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
Why might parental education lead to better WM skills
Better educated parents would be more likely to have books at home, museums etc homing in WM skills at a young age
Is Poor WM recognized as a developmental disorder
No
WM impairments are associated with below or above average IQ?
below-average
WM is a key marker of a number of developmental disorders of learning such as (Alloway and Gathercole, 2006)
- Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
- Dyslexia, dyscalculia
– Specific language impairment (SLI)
– Genetic pathologies (e.g., Down syndrome, William’s syndrome)
According to Alloway and Gathercole (2006) in a typical class of 30 children how many will be above an below average
10% above and 10% below, large differences!
What are the five characteristics of children
with poor WM?
Gathercole and Alloway (2008)
- Poor academic progress: 80% risk
- Problems combining processing and storage
- Place-keeping difficulties
- Behaviour: short attention span, highly distractible
- Difficulties in following instructions
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
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)
Can you name the three principal methods
to reduce the difficulties that arise from
poor WM?
(Holmes, Gathercole and Dunning 2010)
1) Classroom based support
2) Strategy training
3) Adaptive training regimes
Explain how classroom based support can reduce the difficulties that arise from
poor WM?
Adapt the child’s
environment to minimize
WM loads and facilitate
classroom learning
Explain how strategy training can reduce the difficulties that arise from
poor WM?
Encourage children to use effective mnemonic strategies that might relieve the pressure
on relatively low memory capacities
Explain how Adaptive
training regimes can reduce the difficulties that arise from
poor WM?
Directly training working
memory through repeated practice on WM tasks that adapt continuously to maintain challenge
What are 2 aspects of interventions that make them more useful?
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
What is the difference between ‘near’ and
‘far’ transfer effects?
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
What is the difference between ‘adaptive’
and ‘non-adaptive’ WM training?
adaptive - gets increasingly difficult as they get better
Can you summarise the design and key findings reported by Klingberg, Forssberg, &;
Westerberg (2002)?
An issue of this study
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
Can you summarise the design and key findings reported by Jaeggi et al. (2008)?
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
Can you summarise the design and key findings reported by Klingberg, Forssberg, &
Westerberg (2002)?
An issue of this study
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
Can you summarise the design and key findings reported by Holmes et al (2009)?
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
Can you summarise the design and key findings reported by Redick et al (2013)?
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
What is the design of a randomised placebo-controlled study?
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
What did Astle, Barnes, Baker, Colclough, &; Woolrich (2015) find?
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.
Who had reservations that the multicomponent model was not applicable for 4-6 year olds?
Swanson (2008)
