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Working Memory > Lecture 4 > Flashcards

Lecture 4 Flashcards

1
Q

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

A

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

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2
Q

Newborn visual fixation is believed to be primarily

involuntary - what is it controlled by?

A

A reflexive system

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3
Q

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

A

Posterior orienting system involved in the voluntary
control of eye movements

  • due to synaptic pruning
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4
Q

What was Oakes et al (2013) investigating?

A

Development of WM during 6-8 months

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5
Q

Explain the design of Oakes et al (2013) experiment

A

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

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6
Q

What were Oakes et al (2013) findings?

A

Difference between 6 and 8 months,

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

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7
Q

What were Courage et al (2006) investigating?

A

0-12 months WM

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8
Q

Explain the Courage et al (2006) experiment

A

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
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9
Q

Findings of Courage et al (2006)

A

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
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10
Q

Conclusions from Courage et al (2006)

A

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

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11
Q

Gathercole, Pickering, Ambridge & Wearing, 2004 Experiment outline

A

Assessed over 700 children aged between 4 and 15

Used a range of WM measures

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12
Q

Why did Gathercole et al (2004) undergo her experiment

A

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

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13
Q

Findings of Gathercole (2004)

A

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

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14
Q

What is the difference between exploratory

and confirmatory factor analysis?

A

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

Confirmatory factor analysis - is theory driven

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15
Q

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

A

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

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16
Q

Findings of Alloway et al (2006)

A

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.

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17
Q

Conclusions of Gathercole et al (2004)

A

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

18
Q

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

A

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

19
Q

What did Hackman (2015) find?

A

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

20
Q

Why might parental education lead to better WM skills

A

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

21
Q

Is Poor WM recognized as a developmental disorder

A

No

22
Q

WM impairments are associated with below or above average IQ?

A

below-average

23
Q

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

A
  • Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
  • Dyslexia, dyscalculia
    – Specific language impairment (SLI)
    – Genetic pathologies (e.g., Down syndrome, William’s syndrome)
24
Q

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

A

10% above and 10% below, large differences!

25
Q

What are the five characteristics of children
with poor WM?

Gathercole and Alloway (2008)

A
  • Poor academic progress: 80% risk
  • Problems combining processing and storage
  • Place-keeping difficulties
  • Behaviour: short attention span, highly distractible
  • Difficulties in following instructions
26
Q

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

A

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)

27
Q

Can you name the three principal methods
to reduce the difficulties that arise from
poor WM?

(Holmes, Gathercole and Dunning 2010)

A

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

28
Q

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

A

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

29
Q

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

A

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

30
Q

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

A

Directly training working

memory through repeated practice on WM tasks that adapt continuously to maintain challenge

31
Q

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

A

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

32
Q

What is the difference between ‘near’ and

‘far’ transfer effects?

A

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

33
Q

What is the difference between ‘adaptive’

and ‘non-adaptive’ WM training?

A

adaptive - gets increasingly difficult as they get better

34
Q

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

An issue of this study

A

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

35
Q

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

A

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

36
Q

Can you summarise the design and key findings reported by Klingberg, Forssberg, &
Westerberg (2002)?

An issue of this study

A

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

37
Q

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

A

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
38
Q

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

A

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
39
Q

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

A

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

40
Q

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

A

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.

41
Q

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

A

Swanson (2008)

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