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

Wang, Xiaoli; Logie, Robert H.; Jarrold, Christopher

doi:10.3758/s13421-016-0602-2

Cited by 10 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 61 publications

(144 reference statements)

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“…Also, it is possible that older adults struggled to implement the strategy because it was visually based—some previous research suggests that visual WM declines more in healthy ageing than verbal WM (e.g., Johnson et al, 2010 ). Similarly, more older than younger adults in our uninstructed control group reported using a sub-vocal Rehearsal strategy, that is, silent repetition of verbal labels for material to be recalled (see Logie et al, 1996 ; Wang et al, 2016 ). Specifically, 4 younger and 25 older adults used this strategy in the three N-back tasks combined (see Figure 4 ), supporting previous suggestions that older adults may rely more on verbal rehearsal even in visual WM tasks ( Forsberg et al, 2019 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Strategy mediation in working memory training in younger and older adults

Forsberg

Fellman

Laine

et al. 2020

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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Working memory (WM) training with the N-Back task has been argued to improve cognitive capacity and general cognitive abilities (the Capacity Hypothesis of training), although several studies have shown little or no evidence for such improvements beyond tasks that are very similar to the trained task. Laine et al. demonstrated that instructing young adult participants to use a specific visualisation strategy for N-back training resulted in clear, generalised benefits from only 30 min of training (Strategy Mediation Hypothesis of training). Here, we report a systematic replication and extension of the Laine et al. study, by administering 60 younger and 60 older participants a set of WM tasks before and after a 30-min N-back training session. Half the participants were instructed to use a visualisation strategy, the others received no instruction. The pre-post test battery encompassed a criterion task (digit N-back), two untrained tasks N-back tasks (letters and colours), and three structurally different WM tasks. The instructed visualisation strategy significantly boosted at least some measures of N-back performance in participants of both age groups, although the strategy generally appeared more difficult to implement and less beneficial for older adults. However, the strategy did not improve performance on structurally different WM tasks. We also found significant associations between N-back performance and the type and level of detail of self-generated strategies in the uninstructed participants, as well as age group differences in reported strategy types. WM performance appeared to partly reflect the application of strategies, and Strategy Mediation should be considered to understand the mechanisms of WM training. Claims of efficient training should demonstrate useful improvement beyond task-specific strategies.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Strategy mediation in working memory training in younger and older adults

Forsberg

Fellman

Laine

et al. 2020

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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“…For example, Saito, Logie, Morita, & Law (2008) showed that participants used both visual and verbal codes to retain visually presented letter and word sequences (see also Logie, Saito, Morita, Varma, & Norris, 2016;. When a visual stimulus is translated into a verbal code it can be maintained in memory via sub-vocal rehearsal, i.e., silent repetition of verbal labels for material to be recalled (see Logie, Della Sala, Laiacona, Chalmers, & Wynn, 1996;Wang, Logie, & Jarrold, 2016). Sub-vocal rehearsal is an essential feature of the 'phonological loop' (Baddeley, 1986(Baddeley, , 1992Baddeley, Lewis, & Vallar, 1984 ), part of the multi-component model of working memory (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974;Baddeley, 1986;Baddeley & Logie, 1999).…”

Section: Take Down Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

Aging and feature-binding in visual working memory: The role of verbal rehearsal.

Forsberg¹,

Johnson²,

Logie³

2019

Psychology and Aging

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Age-related decline in ability to bind and remember conjunctions of features has been proposed as an explanation for the pronounced decline of visual Working Memory (WM) in healthy aging. However, evidence that older adults exhibit greater visual feature binding deficits than younger adults has been mixed. Binding deficits in older adults are often observed using paradigms with easy-to-label features. Labeling and rehearsing single features may result in apparent binding deficits if older adults rely on comparatively intact verbal memory to compensate for declining visual WM. This strategy would be more useful for single features (e.g., 'red'), than for conjunctions of features (e.g., 'red triangle') which are more cumbersome to rehearse, and thus visual feature-binding paradigms which do not prevent verbal strategies may unintentionally measure verbal load differences. Across three experiments (total N = 150), we investigated the role of verbal rehearsal by manipulating ease of stimulus labeling for visually presented single features and conjunctions of two features. Overall, visual memory for difficult-to-label, non-categorical, visual information appeared especially limited for older adults, likely because it impedes engagement of other systems, such as verbal WM or long-term memory. Therefore, comparing younger-and older-adult task performance may not straightforwardly reveal age-related visual WM decline, but instead reflect applications of different strategies that tap different cognitive mechanisms. We discuss implications for the feature-binding literature, and the wider visual WM literature.

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“…Developmental improvements in WM may, for example, be driven by increases in storage capacity (Cowan, Ricker, Clark, Hinrichs, & Glass, 2014) and / or attention (Barrouillet, Gavens, Vergauwe, Gaillard, & Camos, 2009;Tam, Jarrold, Baddeley, & Sabatos-DeVito, 2010). They may also be the consequences of changes in rehearsal strategies (Gathercole, Adams, & Hitch, 1994;Hitch, Halliday, Schaafstal, & Heffernan, 1991), although it is now understood that limitations in the sensitivity of memory span in pre-school children may obscure the clear signatures of phonologically based rehearsal in older children and adults (Jarrold, 2016;Wang, Logie, & Jarrold, 2016).…”

Section: Working Memory and Its Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Differences in brain morphology and working memory capacity across childhood

Bathelt

Gathercole

Johnson

et al. 2017

Developmental Science

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Working memory (WM) skills are closely associated with learning progress in key areas such as reading and mathematics across childhood. As yet, however, little is known about how the brain systems underpinning WM develop over this critical developmental period. The current study investigated whether and how structural brain correlates of components of the working memory system change over development. Verbal and visuospatial short‐term and working memory were assessed in 153 children between 5.58 and 15.92 years, and latent components of the working memory system were derived. Fractional anisotropy and cortical thickness maps were derived from T1‐weighted and diffusion‐weighted MRI and processed using eigenanatomy decomposition. There was a greater involvement of the corpus callosum and posterior temporal white matter in younger children for performance associated with the executive part of the working memory system. For older children, this was more closely linked with the thickness of the occipitotemporal cortex. These findings suggest that increasing specialization leads to shifts in the contribution of neural substrates over childhood, moving from an early dependence on a distributed system supported by long‐range connections to later reliance on specialized local circuitry. Our findings demonstrate that despite the component factor structure being stable across childhood, the underlying brain systems supporting working memory change. Taking the age of the child into account, and not just their overall score, is likely to be critical for understanding the nature of the limitations on their working memory capacity.

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

Cited by 10 publications

References 61 publications

Strategy mediation in working memory training in younger and older adults

Strategy mediation in working memory training in younger and older adults

Aging and feature-binding in visual working memory: The role of verbal rehearsal.

Differences in brain morphology and working memory capacity across childhood

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