Case Studies in Working Memory: A Case for Single Cases?

Sala, Sergio Della; Logie, Robert H.; Marchetti, C.; Wynn, V.

doi:10.1016/s0010-9452(13)80122-0

Cited by 39 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Given the nature of dual-task performance, we were concerned that the subjects would become overly fatigued or would improve with practice if all subjects were required to carry out the addition task under all five experimental conditions (control plus four dual-task conditions). The subjects might, for example, alter their strategy in the course of the experiment (e.g., Della Sala, Logie, Marchetti, & Wynn, 1991;Siegler, 1987) if they had extensive experience of the experimental procedure. The subjects were split into four groups of 6 subjects, with each group corresponding to one of the secondary tasks.…”

Section: Experiments 1 Mentalarithmeticwith Auditory Presentation Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Counting on working memory in arithmetic problem solving

1994

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Section: Experiments 1 Mentalarithmeticwith Auditory Presentation Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Counting on working memory in arithmetic problem solving

1994

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“…For example, subjects may attempt to use some form of mnemonic rather than subvocal rehearsal to retain the word list (Della Sala, Logie, Marchetti, & Wynn, 1991). One other possibility is that such "recalcitrant" subjects may have some form of mild, hitherto undetected, brain damage so that they are performing as if they have a short-term memory deficit.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…In a study ofour own (Della Sala et al, 1991), we investigated the pattern of phonological similarity and wordlength effects in 15 normal subjects and in an anarthric patient. Anarthric patients have suffered brain damage resulting in an inability to control the speech output mechanisms, such as articulation, without impairment of centrallanguage processing.…”

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confidence: 99%

Group aggregates and individual reliability: The case of verbal short-term memory

et al. 1996

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Two experiments examined the generalizability of the effects of word length and phonological similarity with visual and auditory presentation in immediate verbal serial ordered recall. In Experiment 1, data were collected from 251 adult volunteers drawn from a broad cross-section of the normal population. Word length and phonological similarity in both presentation modes significantly influenced the group means. However, 43% of the subjects failed to show at least one of the effects, and the likelihood that effects appeared was highly correlated with verbal memory span. In Experiment 2, 40 subjects of the original sample were retested, 20 of whom had failed to show one or more effects in Experiment 1. Whether or not an effect had appeared for individual subjects on the first test session was a poor predictor of whether the effect would appear on retest. Finally,an analysis of subject reports demonstrated that the patterns of experimental data could be accounted for in part by the strategies that subjects reported using, and the effect of strategy was independent of the effect of span. The implications of these findings for theories of verbal short-term memory are discussed.Current views as to the characteristics of verbal shortterm memory owe much to the discovery and exploration of the effects on immediate serial ordered recall of word length and phonological similarity. The word-length effect refers to the tendency for normal adult subjects to have more difficulty in immediate serial ordered recall of a sequence oflong words (e.g., university, aluminium, hippopotamus, refrigerator) than in that of a sequence of short words (e.g., scroll, switch, zinc, maths). The phonological similarity effect arises from the relative difficulty in serial ordered recall of phonologically similar items (e.g., man, mad, map, mat) compared with recall ofa sequence of items that are phonologically distinct (e.g., day, boy, sup,few). Word-length and phonological similarity effects appear whether the subjects read or listen to the word sequence for recall.These are robust effects that have been replicated widely with a range of materials using groups of normal subjects (e.g., Baddeley, Thomson, & Buchanan, 1975; Caplan, Ro-Part ofthe work on which this paper is based was supported by a travel grant given to the first author from the Trustees of the journal Brain. We are grateful to Alan Baddeley for very helpful discussions on this topic, and to Marc Marschark for useful discussions on the incidence of head injury in the college population. We are also grateful to Nelson Cowan

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“…This variability in strategy use might therefore be a major source of variability in data patterns that might otherwise be interpreted as measurement noise. Indeed, the data from Subject 37 and from Della Sala et al (1991) suggest that the lack of these effects in participants with higher spans cannot necessarily be taken as evidence that the verbal short-term memory system functions in a qualitatively different way from that of other individuals with equally good task performance. In this case, and as noted by Logie et al (1996), the participants may simply choose not to use subvocal rehearsal to perform the task, and instead rely on alternative strategies (cf.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…Logie et al (1996) therefore argued that a substantial minority of participants were not using subvocal rehearsal to retain the word sequences, or were not doing so consistently from trial to trial or across different testing sessions. In a previous study, Della Sala et al (1991) demonstrated that a participant with a very high span consistently failed to show the four effects because he was using imagery mnemonics and only showed the effects when he was specifically instructed to use subvocal rehearsal to remember the words.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Interpreting potential markers of storage and rehearsal: Implications for studies of verbal short-term memory and neuropsychological cases

2016

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Neuropsychological studies of verbal short-term memory have often focused on two signature effects -phonological similarity and word length -the absence of which has been taken to indicate problems in phonological storage and rehearsal respectively. In the present study we present a possible alternative reading of such data, namely that the absence of these effects can follow as a consequence of an individual's poor level of recall. Data from a large normative sample of 251 adult participants were re-analyzed under the assumption that the size of phonological similarity and word length effects are proportional to an individual's overall level of recall. For both manipulations, when proportionalized effects were plotted against memory span, the same function fit the data in both auditory and visual presentation conditions. Furthermore, two additional sets of single-case data were broadly comparable to those that would be expected for an individual's level of verbal short-term memory performance albeit with some variation across tasks. These findings indicate that the absolute magnitude of phonological similarity and word length effects depends on overall levels of recall, and that these effects are necessarily eliminated at low levels of verbal short-term memory performance. This has implications for how one interprets any variation in the size of these effects, and raises serious questions about the causal direction of any relationship between impaired verbal short-term memory and the absence of phonological similarity or word length effects.

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Case Studies in Working Memory: A Case for Single Cases?

Cited by 39 publications

References 22 publications

Counting on working memory in arithmetic problem solving

Counting on working memory in arithmetic problem solving

Group aggregates and individual reliability: The case of verbal short-term memory

Interpreting potential markers of storage and rehearsal: Implications for studies of verbal short-term memory and neuropsychological cases

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