Browsing by Subject "working memory"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5

Age, Working Memory, Figurative Language Type, And Reading Ability: Influencing Factors In African American Adults' Comprehension Of Figurative Language
(2003-02) Qualls, Constance D.; Harris, Joyce L.; Harris, Joyce L.
This study investigated the cognitive and linguistic factors presumed to be associated with adult comprehension of figurative language, including age, working memory (WM), figurative language type, and reading comprehension (RC). Forty younger (M = 22 years) and 40 older (M = 63 years) healthy African American adults completed WM and reading tasks, and the 60-item forced-choice multiple-category (20 idioms, 20 metaphors, and 20 metonyms) Figurative Language Comprehension Test. After controlling for WM and RC, the older adults outperformed the younger adults on idioms and metonyms. Metaphor comprehension was comparable between the groups. Findings demonstrate that WM and RC underlie adults' comprehension of figurative language and should be considered when interpreting performance on tests assessing figurative language competence in this population.
Effects of executive control on memory integration and inference in adults
(2021) Quesada, Lauren L.; Preston, Alison R.
Expanding knowledge in the face of associated and potentially competitive information depends on memory integration. Prior research shows evidence of memory integration in associative learning tasks, which is often correlated with prefrontal activation. While prefrontal regions are implicated in executive control, there’s little evidence of the causal role of executive control on integration. In the present research, adults (N=12) completed a well-established associative learning task in which they learned a series of character-object AB pairs followed by overlapping object-object BC pairs. Following learning, integration of the overlapping pairs was assessed through inference task performance, in which they were tested for knowledge of the novel AC pairs. Critically, half of the overlapping BC pairs were learned while completing a divided attention task in which participants were asked to count simultaneously presented sounds, whereas the other half of BC pairs were incidentally encoded as in prior research, thus serving as a within-participant baseline performance comparison. The divided attention manipulation was designed to engage executive control processes, thus preventing utilization of such processes for additional tasks, namely for formation of the relation between AB and BC pairs online during overlapping learning. Retrieval of direct pairs learned in the divided attention condition was worse compared to pairs in the control condition, suggesting that the manipulation impaired attentional resources. Moreover, adults demonstrated decreased inference accuracy and increased response times for AC items learned under the divided attention condition relative to pairs learned in the control condition, even when direct AB and BC memory was controlled. These results demonstrate how targeting executive processes results in decreased integration, thus providing direct evidence for the role of executive control in flexible memory integration.
Effects of Mood on Directed Forgetting
(2023) Zheng, Sabrina; Lewis-Peacock, Jarrod A.
Working memory is the ability to retain and manipulate a limited amount of information. It’s limited in the amount of information it can hold simultaneously, therefore it would be beneficial to effectively remove information intentionally. The item method directed forgetting task is one way to investigate how information is removed from memory. Studies have continually shown that memory for items that are associated with a remember cue are remembered better than items associated with a forget cue, known as the directed forgetting effect. Mood states may be one factor that impacts the directed forgetting effect, but these effects have not been extensively studied. Negative mood states tend to enhance detailed processing leading to better memory for item level details, whereas positive mood states promote global processing leading to more categorical memory. Prior literature has found mixed results regarding the impact of mood on an item-method directed forgetting task; some finding that a negative mood reduces forgetting while others finding that negative mood has no effect on forgetting when compared to a positive mood condition. These previous studies did not specify methods of forgetting which may explain the inconsistent results. This study investigated the effects of sad and happy moods on the directed forgetting operational cues: maintain, clear, and suppress. Results suggested that mood was successfully manipulated only in the positive mood group which could explain the insignificant differences in memory between the two mood groups. Interestingly, memory was worse for clear cued memory items over maintain items in the positive mood group, suggesting that clear was a more effective forget cue than suppress. Future studies will investigate alternative methods to manipulate mood more effectively to fully explore our research question. These effects could help us better understand and treat patients suffering mental health conditions involving intrusive thoughts.
The Relations of Self-Regulation to Children’s Internalizing and Externalizing Behavioral Problems
(2020) Ma, Youchuan; Gershoff, Elizabeth
The present study examined the relations of self-regulation to children’s internalizing and externalizing behavioral problems. The study participants consisted of approximately 18,000 children, aged 52 to 99 months (M = 73 months, SD = 4.47). Children’s self-regulation was measured by four core regulatory processes: inhibitory control, attentional focus, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Direct child assessments were used to evaluate children’s working memory and cognitive flexibility. Teachers reported children’s inhibitory control and attentional focus, as well as their internalizing and externalizing behavioral problems. Correlation and linear regression analyses were conducted using data collected in spring 2011 by the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010–11 (ECLS-K:2011). In general, the four core regulatory processes explained more variance in children’s externalizing behavioral problems (R2 = 0.52) than internalizing behavioral problems (R2 = 0.09). Children’s externalizing behavioral problems were strongly associated with inhibitory control (r = -0.71; p < 0.001) and moderately related to attentional focus (r = -0.55; p < 0.001). Multiple linear regression models revealed that inhibitory control was a strong predictor of children’s externalizing behavioral problems (β = -0.73; p < 0.001) while attentional focus was a moderate predictor of children’s internalizing behavioral problems (β = -0.18; p < 0.001). Findings suggest that self-regulation is a multifaceted construct of which its components are related to children’s behavioral problems in differential and predictable ways.
Valence, Working Memory Capacity, and Rumination Influence Efficiency of Updating in Working Memory
(2021-05) Mallya, Meghan; Lewis-Peacock, Jarrod A.
Psychiatric illness can cause impairments to executive function, including deficits in working memory capacity and processes. Working memory (WM) is a limited capacity cognitive system that temporarily maintains and actively manipulates information relevant to current tasks and goals. Manipulation of information is a fundamental process of working memory, but not everyone’s working memory functions similarly. For example, we are able to update irrelevant information, such as negative thoughts that are not serving the tasks or goals on hand. However, when this mechanism no longer works efficiently, people may fixate, or ruminate, on negative information in a maladaptive way. Our goal was to examine individual differences that influence working memory processes. Here we investigated how characteristics of psychiatric illnesses, such as rumination, affect a person’s ability to efficiently update emotional information in mind. Through a working memory updating task, we presented participants with negative and neutral stimuli and tested them on whether they had properly updated the information in mind. Participants were slower and less accurate at responding to negative stimuli. They also took longer and were less accurate with responding to previously shown images that should have been updated (lure response probes). With these lure response probes, people with a high propensity to ruminate (high ruminators) and low working memory capacity (WMC) had faster responses, but worse accuracy. Furthermore, within the low WMC people’s responses to lure probes, high ruminators reacted faster than low ruminators to negative stimuli. Moreover, they reacted faster to negative stimuli than neutral stimuli. We saw that across the board, participants were less efficient at updating negative information. Some participants were also incorrectly identifying lure items as stimuli that are currently being held in mind, when they should have been rejected. This was especially the case with low WMC individuals that were burdened by high rumination, suggesting that rumination impairs updating processes in low WMC people. We also saw how presentation of negative stimuli drove reaction time differences between high and low ruminations. With further research, we will better understand individual differences affecting working memory function.