Wk4 - Central Executive Flashcards
What is the role of the central executive?
To share attention and resources, and coordinate information, between the phonological loop and the visuospatial sketchpad
What controls the central executive?
Operation of a series of existing schema
The supervisory attention system
Who have central executive deficits?
Patients with Alzheimer’s Disease
What do people with central executive deficits struggle with?
Struggle to combine tasks (e.g., a task that requires visuospatial sketchpad and a task that requires phonological loop)
What did Baddeley find about AD patients and their ability to combine tasks in a dual-task experiment?
AD patients showed a predictable, marked deterioration on combination of two tasks (Pursuit Tracking and Digit Span) compared to a normal elderly group
What can we conclude from dual-task experiments?
There is a component going on which is specifically used to combine tasks and to allocate resources.
Supports the idea of a central executive (or supervisory attention system) that allocates attentional resources between slave systems
What brain region mediates task-switching (moving attention from one task to another)?
Prefrontal cortex
What other brain regions have been considered to play a role in ability to combine tasks, as found in studies with AD patients?
Temporoparietal regions/abnormalities
Highlights the importance of more posterior processing regions in working memory
Are there separable parts of working memory?
Yes (can see that memory types can be separated in patients with brain injury and disease)
Do separable parts of memory show distinct neurobiological substrates?
Yes
What is a problem with the idea of the central executive?
Single central executive seems too simple.
There is evidence to suggest that there might be a far more distributed network which combines and allocates resources between slave systems (CE mediated by both prefrontal regions and temporoparietal regions)
What is the role of the episodic buffer?
Integrates information from the phonological loop and the visuospatial sketchpad
Provides an extra link to long-term memory
