WS10: Measuring And Investigating Working Memory - Simple And Complex Tasks

Question 0

Reading span

Answer 0

• Daneman and Carpenter argued that the immediate memory tasks did not seem to capture the ongoing attention all and memory demands of cognitive processing involved in reading and listening comprehension.
• read sentence and have to remember the last word, increasing sentences and words
• more complex Ss had to truth or sense of sentences
• a measure of reading span is the number of sentences for which the final words could be recalled in correct order
• reading span was positively correlated with reading comprehension and other language skills

Question 1

Immediate memory span

Answer 1

• the number of verbal items (often digits) ppl could recall in order from a short list presented at a typical rate of 1 item/second
• the usual procedure was to begin w short lists and progressively increase list until the individual could no longer recall all the items in their correct order
• adopted into Stanford-Binet and Weschler tests

Question 2

Operation span (Turner and Engle, 1989)

Answer 2

• shown an arithmetic sum with an answer and judge correctness and remember word
• after several sums, recall the words in order
• performance on Rspan and Ospan is positively associated w a range of cognitive and clinical symptoms

Question 3

Simple memory span task we completed

Answer 3

• task we first completed
• list of 4-10 digits, dissimilar letters, similar letters, short words, long words
• memory span for each type of list is the length of the longest list correctly recalled

Question 4

Methodological issues with simple memory span taks

Answer 4

List items
- Unsworth et al. (2005) recommend using letters as list items in all versions of the complex span task, or if words are used in the reading span task that were unrelated to the sentence. Memory for sentence final words might be affected by reading skill and the word’s relationship to the sentence

Randomising list length
- as S can develop strategies for a block of one length

Control of exposure duration
- some allow Ss unlimited time and this encourages use of rehearsal, causes variability in the data

Scoring method
- using longest list before errors occur as the measure of span. For complex span this measure is regarded as imprecise and Conway et. al argue for a scoring method that gives credit for items correctly recalled rather than entire lists, a cruder less disc measure that does not correlate as highly w performance on other tasks. It is also important to assess accuracy on the judgement task and the usual practice is to adopt a reasonably high criterion of correctness

Using complex Span score as an ind diff variable - median split and extreme group design: median split on complex span score is not acceptable, leads to erroneous group. Extreme groups (top vs bottom quartile) is also subject to error, though less so. Using ANCOVA or regression design in more appropriate