Following instructions from working memory: Why does action at encoding and recall help?

Two experiments investigated the consequences of action at encoding and recall on the ability to follow sequences of instructions. Children aged 7–9 years recalled sequences of spoken action commands under presentation and recall conditions that either did or did not involve their physical performance. In both experiments, recall was enhanced by carrying out the instructions as they were being initially presented and also by performing them at recall. In contrast, the accuracy of instruction-following did not improve above spoken presentation alone, either when the instructions were silently read or heard by the child (Experiment 1), or when the child repeated the spoken instructions as they were presented (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that the enactment advantage at presentation does not simply reflect a general benefit of a dual exposure to instructions, and that it is not a result of their self-production at presentation. The benefits of action-based recall were reduced following enactment during presentation, suggesting that the positive effects of action at encoding and recall may have a common origin. It is proposed that the benefits of physical movement arise from the existence of a short-term motor store that maintains the temporal, spatial, and motoric features of either planned or already executed actions.

Identification of tone duration, line length and letter position: An experimental approach to timing and working memory deficits in schizophrenia.

Patients with schizophrenia display numerous cognitive deficits, including problems in working memory, time estimation, and absolute identification of stimuli. Research in these fields has traditionally been conducted independently. We examined these cognitive processes using tasks that are structurally similar and that yield rich error data. Relative to healthy control participants (n = 20), patients with schizophrenia (n = 20) were impaired on a duration identification task and a probed-recall memory task but not on a line-length identification task. These findings do not support the notion of a global impairment in absolute identification in schizophrenia. However, the authors suggest that some aspect of temporal information processing is indeed disturbed in schizophrenia.

Gender influences the detection of spatial working memory deficits in bipolar disorder.

Objective: Despite evidence that gender may influence neurocognitive functioning, few studies have examined its effects in bipolar disorder (BD) a priori. The aim of this study was to examine how gender influences executive-type functions, which are potentially useful as endophenotypes for BD. Methods: The performance of 26 euthymic patients(12 males, 14 females) with DSM-IV BD (20 BD type I and six BD type II) was compared to that of 26 controls (12 males, 14 females) on tests of executive function. Controls were matched to patients on an individual basis for sex, age and premorbid IQ. Tests assessed spatial working memory (SWM), planning, attentional set-shifting and verbal fluency. Results: Overall, patients showed deficits in SWM strategy (p < 0.001) and made more SWM errors relative to controls (p < 0.001). These deficits were more apparent in male-only comparisons (both p < 0.001) than in female-only comparisons (both p < 0.05). When examined in isolation, male controls were significantly better at performing the SWM task than female controls (both p < 0.05). This pattern was not observed in the patient cohort: male patients had poorer strategy scores than female patients (p < 0.05), but made a similar number of SWM errors. Conclusions: These findings provide evidence that gender can influence the detection of SWM deficits in the euthymic phase of BD, as the sex-related disequilibrium in SWM identified in healthy controls was disrupted in BD. © 2008 The Authors Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Munksgaard.

Auditory sensory memory and working memory processes in children with normal hearing and cochlear implants.

There can be wide variation in the level of oral/aural language ability that prelingually hearing-impaired children develop after cochlear implantation. Automatic perceptual processing mechanisms have come under increasing scrutiny in attempts to explain this variation. Using mismatch negativity methods, this study explored associations between auditory sensory memory mechanisms and verbal working memory function in children with cochlear implants and a group of hearing controls of similar age. Whilst clear relationships were observed in the hearing children between mismatch activation and working memory measures, this association appeared to be disrupted in the implant children. These findings would fit with the proposal that early auditory deprivation and a degraded auditory signal can cause changes in the processes underpinning the development of oral/aural language skills in prelingually hearing-impaired children with cochlear implants and thus alter their developmental trajectory

Working Memory and Postural Control: Adult Age Differences in Potential for Improvement, Task Priority, and Dual Tasking

We investigate dynamic posture control and working memory (NBack) retest practice in young and older adults, focusing on older adults' potential for improvement in the component tasks but more importantly in dual-task performance. Participants performed the 2 tasks in 11 sessions under single- and dual-task conditions. Posture improvement was observed with retest practice for both groups. Increase in cognitive load after initial practice led to greater dual-task costs in both tasks in older adults and higher costs in memory in young adults. With continued practice, costs were reduced by both groups; however, the 2 groups focused improvement on different tasks: Older adults focused on posture but young adults on cognition. These results emphasize older adults' potential for improvement in dual-task performance and their flexibility to utilize the practice gains in posture to optimize cognitive performance.

Dual task performance of working memory and postural control in major depressive disorder

Objective: Previous studies with patients diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) revealed deficits in working memory and executive functions. In the present study we investigated whether patients with MDD have the ability to allocate cognitive resources in dual task performance of a highly challenging cognitive task (working memory) and a task that is seemingly automatic in nature (postural control). Method: Fifteen young (18–35 years old) patients with MDD and 24 healthy age-matched controls performed a working memory task and two postural control tasks (standing on a stable or on a moving platform) both separately (single task) and concurrently (dual task). Results: Postural stability under single task conditions was similar in the two groups, and in line with earlier studies, MDD patients recalled fewer working memory items than controls. To equate working memory challenges for patients and controls, task difficulty (number of items presented) in dual task was individually adjusted such that accuracy of working memory performance was similar for the two groups under single task conditions. Patients showed greater postural instability in dual task performance on the stable platform, and more importantly when posture task difficulty increased (moving platform) they showed deficits in both working memory accuracy and postural stability compared with healthy controls. Conclusions: We interpret our results as evidence for executive control deficits in MDD patients that affect their task coordination. In multitasking, these deficits affect not only cognitive but also sensorimotor task performance.

Problem-solving and spatial working memory in patients with schizophrenia and with focal frontal and temporal lobe lesions

Problem-solving ability was investigated in 25 DSM-IIIR schizophrenic (SC) patients using the Tower of Hanoi (TOH) task. Their performance was compared to that of: (1) 22 patients with neurosurgical unilateral prefrontal lesions, 11 left (LF) and 10 right hemisphere (RF); (2) 38 patients with unilateral temporal lobectomies, 19 left (LT) and 19 right (RT); and (3) 44 matched control subjects. Like the RT and LF group, the schizophrenics were significantly impaired on the TOH. The deficit shown by the schizophrenic group was equivalent whether or not the problems to be solved included goal-subgoal conflicts, unlike the LF group who were impaired specifically on these problems. The nature of the SC deficit was also distinct from that of the RT group, in that the problem-solving deficit remained after controlling for the effects of spatial memory performance. This study indicates, therefore, that neither focal frontal nor temporal lobe damage sustained in adult life is a sufficient explanation for the problem-solving deficits found in patients with schizophrenia. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

The role of working memory capacity in multiple-cue probability learning

Multiple-cue probability learning (MCPL) involves learning to predict a criterion when outcome feedback is provided for multiple cues. A great deal of research suggests that working memory capacity (WMC) is involved in a wide range of tasks that draw on higher level cognitive processes. In three experiments, we examined the role of WMC in MCPL by introducing measures of working memory capacity, as well as other task manipulations. While individual differences in WMC positively predicted performance in some kinds of multiple-cue tasks, performance on other tasks was entirely unrelated to these differences. Performance on tasks that contained negative cues was correlated with working memory capacity, as well as measures of explicit knowledge obtained in the learning process. When the relevant cues predicted positively, however, WMC became irrelevant. The results are discussed in terms of controlled and automatic processes in learning and judgement. © 2011 The Experimental Psychology Society.

Blocking in children's causal learning depends on working memory and reasoning abilities.

A sample of 99 children completed a causal learning task that was an analogue of the food allergy paradigm used with adults. The cue competition effects of blocking and unovershadowing were assessed under forward and backward presentation conditions. Children also answered questions probing their ability to make the inference posited to be necessary for blocking by a reasoning account of cue competition. For the first time, children's working memory and general verbal ability were also measured alongside their causal learning. The magnitude of blocking and unovershadowing effects increased with age. However, analyses showed that the best predictor of both blocking and unovershadowing effects was children's performance on the reasoning questions. The magnitude of the blocking effect was also predicted by children's working memory abilities. These findings provide new evidence that cue competition effects such as blocking are underpinned by effortful reasoning processes. 

Evidence of syntactic working memory usage in MEG data

While reading times are often used to measure working memory load, frequency effects (such as surprisal or n-gram frequencies) also have strong confounding effects on reading times. This work uses a naturalistic audio corpus with magnetoencephalographic (MEG) annotations to measure working memory load during sentence processing. Alpha oscillations in posterior regions of the brain have been found to correlate with working memory load in non-linguistic tasks (Jensen et al., 2002), and the present study extends these findings to working memory load caused by syntactic center embeddings. Moreover, this work finds that frequency effects in naturally-occurring stimuli do not significantly contribute to neural oscillations in any frequency band, which suggests that many modeling claims could be tested on this sort of data even without controlling for frequency effects.