Working memory - 2 Flashcards
What is purpose of VSSP?
- Maintaining and manipulating visa-spatial information
- spatial orientation
- solution of visuo-spatial problems
- Interface between visual and spatial information
- bind visual information with motor/haptic/tactile information
Evidence for VSSP
- sketchpad disrupted by requiring participants to tap repeatedly a specified pattern of keys or locations, a procedure that impairs the use of visuospatial imagery
- unattended patterns or visual noise may disrupt the visual component of the system
- Corsi span (test in which task is to reproduce visuo-spatial sequences using set of 9 identical cubes mounted at locations on board) and auditory digit span impaired independently in patients with different lesions
How was it proposed that VSSP can be divided?
- visual cache: stores info about visual form and colour
- inner scribe: deals with spatial and movement information (and basic mechanism for rehearsal)
How does the stroke victim LH perform?
- performed much better on memory tasks involving spatial processing than on tasks involving the visual aspects of imagery (eg, judging animal sizes)
- occipital lobe impaired
What is the central executive?
- the ‘black box’
- drives the system; allocates the resources
- has no storage capacity
- limited capacity so cannot attend to many things at once
- temporary activation of long-term memory
What were the 4 assumed functions of the central executive?
- the coordination of simultaneous tasks and task switching
- the control of encoding and retrieval strategies of temporarily stored information (also when retrieved from the long-term store)
- the selection of attention and inhibitory processes
- the retrieval and manipulation of long-term stored information
What was the study investigating the Central Executive?
-asked participants to think of random digits that bore no connection to each other (by tapping in numbers on a keyboard) Either carried out on its own, or with one of the following tasks:
Reciting the alphabet
Counting from 1
Alternating between letters and numbers e.g. A1 b2 c3
What was the finding of the central executive study?
-generated number stream was much less random in condition 3 – Baddeley said they were competing for the same central executive resources
What was the binding problem?
- how into from two subsidiary systems could be bound together
- because in real world we recall things in multi modal format
What theory was proposed to solve binding problem?
-Episodic buffer
Purpose of episodic buffer
- integrates info across modalities and from different sources
- limited storage capacity
- buffer retrieval through conscious awareness
- originally thought to be capable of manipulating information; but now thought to be a passive structure on which bindings achieved elsewhere can be displayed
What does episodic buffer account for?
- finding that amnesic patients can retain relatively large amounts of complex information briefly (e.g., sentence span)
- findings that articulatory suppression does not have devastating effect on recall of visually presented numbers (drops from 7 to 5 digits)
What is binding process unaffected by?
-attentional load
What is attention useful for?
- Visual bindings (objects colour, shape)
- Verbal bindings (words into chunks)
What inför feeds into VSSP?
- Visual
- Spatial
- Haptic
What info feed into phonological loop?
- Speech
- Sign lip reading
- Music environmental sound
What info feeds directly into episodic buffer?
- Smell
- Taste
What is an issue with the baddeley working model?
-Limited links with LTM and working memory in early multicomponent models
Where is central executive found?
-Prefrontal cortex
What is the left ventral cortex role?
-Verbal working memory
What is the right ventral cortex role?
-spatial working memory
What is purpose of ACC?
-Attention controller
Where does the phonological loop occur?
-Broca’s & wernicke’s
What is the role of occipital lobe?
-VSSP
What is role of parietal lobe?
-Episodic buffer
Is there much difference between WM in different individual?
-Substancial differences in WM capacity
What can it be said about individuals who have low-capacity WM?
-Low-capacity individuals have more difficult ignoring distracting information than do high-capacity individuals
Describe how working memory changes as you age
-Stability in WM performance between 20-50 years and thereafter linear decline from 55 years onwards
Why is the role of dopamine and fronto-striatal function important?
-Reduced striatal dopamine levels impair the updating regulation by striatum, which makes PFC representations more rigid and distractor resistant
What is fluid intelligence?
-Gf reasoning abilities consist of strategies, heuristics, and automatized systems that must be used in dealing with novel problems, and solving inductive, deductive, and conjunctive reasoning tasks
What percentage of variance between variance in WM capacity and fluid intelligence ?
-50%
Who do WM training programs benefit?
-Childrens academic and intellectual attainment
What are limited benefits in WM training?
-limited benefits in terms of specific gains on short-term and working memory tasks
Which areas of WM training are seen as less effective?
-academic based reading and arithmetic outcomes
What are some of the questions regarding episodic buffer?
- how to measure capacity?
- How is rehearsal maintained?
What is the main question of phonological loop?
-precise nature of forgetting within the phonological store remains controversial – time-based trace decay or interference?
What is the question regarding taste and smell?
-are there Seperate subsystems for this?
What is main question regarding?
-visual and spatial aspects appear to be clearly separable but linked within the sketchpad; is this true of haptic, tactile, and kinesthetic memory?
