A complete summary of block 3.5 Memory for Brain and Cognition Specialization. This summary includes all the 7 theme summaries, 3 discussion meeting summaries and all 4 lecture summaries.
Amnesic Patients
- Amnesic patients have a preserved immediate memory. Amnesic patients are capable of some types of learning.
However, they do not remember the learning experience.
- Intrinsic memory is preserved.
Cognitive Theories
- Summarize our knowledge in a simple and structured way that helps us to understand what is known.
- Reductionism: all scientific explanations should aim to be based on a lower level of analysis: psychology in
terms of physiology, physiology in terms of chemistry and chemistry in terms of physics.
Herman Ebbinghaus (First study of memory)
- Nonsense syllable: consonant-vowel-consonant items.
- Associations are formed between stimuli and responses. More studying lead to better recall.
- Verbal learning: an approach to memory that relies on learning lists of words and nonsense syllables.
Gestalt Psychology
- Emphasized the importance of internal representations rather than observable stimuli and responses.
- Rememberer is important.
- An approach to psychology that attempted to use perceptual principles to understand memory and reasoning.
Bartlett
- Bartlett rejected the learning of meaningless materials as an appropriate way to study memory. He used
complex material such as folk tales.
- Rememberer’s effort after meaning.
- Learning and remembering depends on the internal representations (schemas).
- Schema: knowledge is structured and influences the way new information is stored and recalled.
Memory Systems
- A memory system requires three interacting things.
1. The capacity to encode or enter information into the system.
2. The capacity to store it.
3. The capacity to find and retrieve it.
- The method of registering material or encoding determines what and how the information is stored, which in
turn will limit what can subsequently be retrieved.
Atkinson and Shiffrin (Modal Model)
- Information comes in from the environment and
is first processed by a series of sensory memory
systems.
- Information is then passed on to a temporary
short-term memory system (STM), before being
registered in long-term memory (LTM).
- Information flows in both directions. Our knowledge of the world, stored in LTM, can influence our focus of
attention, which will determine what is fed into the sensory memory systems.
Sensory Memory
- Sensory memory: brief storage of information within a specific modality.
- Iconic memory: brief storage of visual information.
- Echoic memory: an auditory sensory memory.
- Masking: a process by which the perception and/or storage of a stimulus is influenced by events occurring
immediately before presentation (forward masking) or more commonly after (backward masking).
Short-Term and Working Memory (WM)
- STM refer to the temporary storage of small amount of material over brief delays.
, - WM: A memory system that underpins our capacity to "keep things in mind" when performing complex
tasks.
- WM is linked to attention.
Long-Term Memory
- A system that stores information over long periods of time.
- Explicit/declarative memory: Memory that is open to intentional retrieval.
Semantic memory: knowledge of the world.
Episodic memory: the capacity to remember specific events.
- Implicit/nondeclarative memory: Retrieval of information from long-term
memory through performance rather than explicit conscious recall or recognition.
Situations in which some form of learning has occurred, it is reflected in
performance rather than through overt remembering.
- Mental time travel (Tulving): The way in which episodic memory allows us to relive the past and use this
information to imagine the future (i.e., relive the day you were told that your friend passed and remembering
this on the anniversary to send her grave flowers.)
Implicit Memory
- Amnesic patients tend to show an impaired capacity to add to their store of knowledge of the world.
- One preserved form of learning is simple classical conditioning.
- Amnesic patients can also learn motor skills.
- Priming: The process whereby presentation of an item influences the processing of a subsequent item, either
making it easier to process (positive priming) or more difficult (negative priming).
Retrieval in STM – Radvansky
- Retrieval from STM right after you started storing it in STM.
Parallel Search
- All the items in short-term memory are available at once and accessed in parallelly.
- Response times should not vary with set size and there should be no difference between the "yes" and "no"
responses.
Self-Terminating Search
- Involves going through items one at a time, which is serial.
- In this type of search there is an increase in response time with an increase in set size.
- For "no" responses, the function is relatively steep because the person always needs to go through the entire set
to verify that the probe item is not there.
- For ‘yes’ responses, there is an increasing response time slope.
Serial Exhaustive Search
- Involves people going through things one at a time, in serial. However, rather than stopping when they got to
what they were looking for, people would continue until they had gone through the entire set.
- Increasing response time function with increasing set size.
Humans
- Data supports a serial exhaustive search.
- For complex memory process there are both parallel and serial components intermixed in cascading processes.
WM Training Increases Working Memory Capacity (WMC) but Not Fluid Intelligence (Gf) – Harrison
Abstract
- Training on complex WMC tasks leads to improvement on like different materials but that such training does
not generalize to measures of Gf.
Working Memory (WM)
- WM is the interplay between attention and memory that regulates the maintenance and flow of information in
the service of current goals.
- Environmental factors (i.e., sleep deprivation, stereotype threat) lead to a temporary reduction in WMC.
Fluid Intelligence (Gf)
- WMC plays an important causal role in fluid intelligence.
- Fluid intelligence: the ability to reason and solve problems in novel contexts.
Transfer
, - Transfer occurs when practicing one task influences performance on another task.
- Near transfer: if the two tasks have formal similarity.
- Far transfer: if the structural and surface of the task appears to be different.
- It is possible that working memory training can improve performance on WMC tasks without improving WMC
at the construct level.
- Far transfer would be demonstrated if training on complex span tasks led to improvement on a battery of Gf
tasks.
This Study
- Aim: to determine whether WM training improves WMC, and if so, whether such
improvements transfer to measures of Gf.
Method
- Three conditions (complex-span training, simple-span training, or visual search training).
- ALL subjects completed a pretest on a battery of near-, moderate-, and far-transfer tasks,
followed by 20 sessions of training, and finally a posttest.
Trainings
- Complex-span training: two different types of tests at the same one.
1. Adaptive operation-span task: Subjects had to remember individually presented
letters in correct serial order and solve math equations between letter presentations.
2. Adaptive Symmetry-Span task: Subjects had to remember matrix locations in
correct serial order and make symmetry judgments between matrix location presentations. After a
certain number of symmetry judgments, subjects had to click the locations of the highlighted positions
in the order in which they had been displayed.
- Simple span training
1. Adaptive letter-span task: Subjects had to recall letters in their correct serial positions. Letters were
presented one at a time.
2. Adaptive matrix-span task: Subjects saw matrix locations highlighted one by one and were then
shown a recall screen, on which they selected the correct matrix locations in sequential order.
- Adaptive visual search task: subjects saw a brief array of letters in which there was one “F”. The “F” was
either facing toward the right or to the left (a mirror-reversed “F”). Subjects had to indicate which direction the
target was facing. The distractors were “E,” mirror-reversed “E,” and inverted “T.”
Pre and Post Test Assessments
Near Transfer Tasks
- Reading-span task: Subjects saw a sentence and had to judge whether the
sentence made sense. Then, subjects were shown a four-letter word to
remember. After some trials subjects had to click the words on the recall
screen in the order in which they had been presented.
- Rotation-span task: Subjects saw a letter rotated to one of eight different
angles. They had to indicate whether the letter when in the upright
position was facing the correct direction or was mirror-reversed. Subjects
had to click on the arrows on the recall screen in the order in which they
had seen them.
- Word-span task: Subjects had to click the words in the order in which
they had appeared.
- Arrow-span task: Subjects had to recall the arrows in the order in which
they had appeared.
- Running-letter-span task: Subjects saw a series of letters presented one at a time. Once a recall screen
appeared, subjects had to recall the most recent n number of items (e.g., the last six letters) in serial order.
- Running-spatial-span task: Identical to the running-letter-span task, except that matrix locations on a 4 × 4
matrix were the to-be-remembered stimuli.
- Same test, same construct.
Moderate Transfer Tasks
- Keep-track task: Subjects were shown words, from up to six categories and were told to remember the most
recent instances of a certain number of categories (country – France example).
- Visual-arrays task: Subjects saw an array of colored squares for 500 ms. After a short delay, another array
appeared. Subjects indicated whether the second array was identical to the first.
- Immediate free-recall task: Subjects saw five lists of 10 words each. They had to type as many of the words
as they could recall.
- Different tests, same construct.
, Far Transfer Tasks
- Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices task: The lower right part of the matrix was missing. Subjects had
to select a figure that matched the logic.
- Letter-sets task: sets followed a certain letter pattern. Subjects had to select the letter set that did not follow
the pattern.
- Number-series task: Subjects saw a series of numbers arranged in a certain pattern and were asked to select
the next number that would be consistent with the pattern out of five choices.
- Different tests and different constructs.
Results
- Improvements in WMC: Regardless of condition, subjects improved approximately 2.5 standard deviation
units over the course of training.
Transfer
1. Near transfer
- There was a significant increase from pre-test to post-test performance for the complex-span training group.
- All groups, including the visual search group, showed similar improvement. Therefore, we can assume that this
benefit was not a result of WMT.
2. Moderate Transfer
- Immediate free recall did show benefits of training in both the complex- and simple-span-training groups.
- Positive transfer for both the simple and complex training groups, the interaction showed a decrease in
performance for the visual search group.
- These results can be interpreted as evidence for transfer.
3. Far Transfer
- There was no evidence of transfer from any training group for any of the Gf measures.
Discussion
- 20 days of training on complex span tasks leads to transfer to other complex span tasks that use different to-
be-remembered stimuli.
- For both the complex- and simple-span-training groups, there was some evidence for moderate transfer.
- Improvement to WMC at the construct level, but the lack of transfer to other tasks.
- There are two other possible interpretations of our data.
1. Working memory training could improve only aspect of WMC.
2. Subjects could have developed strategies that were applicable to certain transfer tasks but not to others.
- WMC and Gf are different hypothetical constructs and that an intervention that may improve WMC may
have no effect on Gf.
Working Memory – Looking Back and Forward – Baddeley
Working Memory
- WM has limited capacity system, which temporarily maintains and stores information, supports human thought
processes by providing an interface between perception, long-term memory, and action.
Multi-Component Model of WM
- Mid-1960s many studies argued for a separation between LTM and STM.
- Unitary model of memory: information from the environment flows through a series of temporary sensory
registers into a limited capacity short-term store (STS), which feeds information into and out of LTM. This
system was also assumed to act as a WM.
If the STS served as a unitary working memory, patients with STS
impairment should show little capacity for long-term learning or for
everyday cognitive activities.
Baddeley and Hitch Three Component Model
- Proposed a three-component model of WM in place of the unitary system.
- The three components comprised a control system of limited attentional
capacity, central executive, which is assisted by two subsidiary storage systems:
the phonological loop, which is based on sound and language, and the
visuospatial sketchpad.
Phonological Loop
- Structure of the loop: Two parts of the phonological loop
1. Phonological store holds memory processes.
2. Articulatory rehearsal process parallel to subvocal speech.
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