The Mid-Career Award Working out how working memory works: evidence from typical and atypical development

Jarrold, Christopher

doi:10.1080/17470218.2016.1213869

Cited by 15 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 149 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Recently, Jarrold (2017) suggested that rehearsal may be helpful if participants rehearse within their capacity limit. For example, if people can only remember three items, rehearsal of 3-item lists would be beneficial, whereas rehearsal of 4-item lists would yield no benefit, and possibly even a cost, because when rehearsing beyond one's capacity one risks introducing errors into the rehearsed list.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does articulatory rehearsal help immediate serial recall?

Souza

Oberauer

2018

Cognitive Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Articulatory rehearsal is assumed to benefit verbal working memory. Yet, there is no experimental evidence supporting a causal link between rehearsal and serial-order memory, which is one of the hallmarks of working memory functioning. Across four experiments, we tested the hypothesis that rehearsal improves working memory by asking participants to rehearse overtly and by instructing different rehearsal schedules. In Experiments 1a, 1b, and 2, we compared an instructed cumulative-rehearsal condition against a free-rehearsal condition. The instruction increased the prevalence of cumulative rehearsal, but recall performance remained unchanged or decreased compared to the free-rehearsal baseline. Experiment 2 also tested the impact of a fixed rehearsal instruction; this condition yielded substantial performance costs compared to the baseline. Experiment 3 tested whether rehearsals (according to an experimenter-controlled protocol) are beneficial compared to a matched articulatory suppression condition that blocked rehearsals of the memoranda. Again, rehearsing the memoranda yielded no benefit compared to articulatory suppression. In sum, our results are incompatible with the notion that rehearsal is beneficial to working memory.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does articulatory rehearsal help immediate serial recall?

Souza

Oberauer

2018

Cognitive Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Critics argue that rehearsal may be beneficial only when carried out within capacity (e.g. Jarrold, 2017). There are two problems with this argument.…”

Section: Alternative Explanations?mentioning

confidence: 99%

No Evidence That Articulatory Rehearsal Improves Complex Span Performance

Souza

Oberauer

2020

Journal of Cognition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

It is usually assumed that articulatory rehearsal improves verbal working memory. Complex span is the most used paradigm to assess working memory functioning; yet, we still lack knowledge about how participants rehearse in this task, and whether these rehearsals are beneficial.InExperiment1,weinvestigatedthepatternsofnaturallyoccurringovert rehearsals in a complex span task requiring processing of a non-verbal distractor task. For comparison, anothergroupofparticipantscompletedamatchedsimplespantaskwithanunfilleddelayin between the memoranda. Time permitting, participants rehearsed the memory list in forward serial order, a strategy known as cumulative rehearsal. The degree of cumulative rehearsal was correlated with recall accuracy in both span tasks. Rehearsal frequency was, however, reduced in complex span compared to simple span. To assess the causal role of rehearsal in complex span,wetrainedagroupofparticipantsinacumulativerehearsalstrategyinExperiment2. This instruction substantially increased the prevalence of cumulative rehearsals compared to a control group. However, the increase in cumulative rehearsal did not translate into an increase inrecall accuracy.Ourresultsprovidefurtherevidencethatrehearsaldoesnotbenefitworking memory performance.

show abstract

“…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

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

The Mid-Career Award Working out how working memory works: evidence from typical and atypical development

Cited by 15 publications

References 149 publications

Does articulatory rehearsal help immediate serial recall?

Does articulatory rehearsal help immediate serial recall?

No Evidence That Articulatory Rehearsal Improves Complex Span Performance

Differences in brain morphology and working memory capacity across childhood

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About