Verbal working memory

The present study sought to identify cognitive abilities that might distinguish Hong Kong Chinese adolescents with dyslexia and to assess how these abilities were associated with Chinese word reading, word dictation, and reading comprehension. The cognitive skills of interest were morphological awareness, visual-orthographic knowledge, rapid naming, and verbal working memory. A total of 90 junior secondary school students, 30 dyslexic, 30 chronological age controls, and 30 reading level controls was tested on a range of cognitive and literacy tasks. Dyslexic students were less competent than the control students in all cognitive and literacy measures. The regression analyses also showed that verbal working memory, rapid naming, morphological awareness, and visual-orthographic knowledge were significantly associated with literacy performance. Findings underscore the importance of these cognitive skills for Chinese literacy acquisition. Overall, this study highlights the persistent difficulties of Chinese dyslexic adolescents who seem to have multiple causes for reading and spelling difficulties.

Language scholars as far back as Behaghel (1909) have noted the tendency to produce short before long. What underlies this principle of end-weight? Several accounts that develop an incremental view of production—speakers produce what they can as soon as they can—may be seen as necessarily motivated by a constrained capacity view of human cognitive faculties. Such resources—for example, working memory capacity—typically vary across the population, while the preference for end-weight has previously been modeled as fixed across the population. In the present work, it is argued that if the principle of end-weight is motivated by limits on such an underlying resource that varies by individual, we should see significant variation by individual in strength of preference for end-weight. Corpus and experimental studies subsequently confirm significant individual variation in strength of such preferences. Next, we see the principle of end-weight at play in several English syntactic-alternation constructions, including dative shift, verb-particle placement, prepositional phrase ordering, and heavy-NP shift, among others. Looking across these constructions, if individual preference for end-weight is motivated by a limited, underlying cognitive resource, such a resource should nevertheless remain constant within each individual across constructions. Having thus found individual variation in the principle of end-weight, a given speaker's strength of preference may be expected to remain relatively steady across constructions—that is, consistency in variation. Testing this proposition presents a methodological challenge. Existing syntactically parsed corpora of natural speech are generally built shallow—many speakers but insufficient contributions per speaker to model individual end-weight preference. To address this, a deep parsed corpus is developed—yielding up to 2.5M words per speaker—as well as novel statistical approaches for exploring correlation of per-speaker preferences across models of separate constructions. Multiple studies with this corpus and complementary experiments indicate a significant measure of consistency in each individual's relative strength of end-weight preference across constructions, as predicted. These results do not prove constrained capacity; other compatible accounts include the possibility that we develop individual production preferences through exposure to prior distributions. If so, though, the results above introduce the provision that in developing our individual production preferences, each speaker synthesizes a single rule—or at least a substantially consistent preference—across different syntactic-alternation constructions. This may be seen as a syntactic neighborhood effect. Finally, though, a pair of prior studies suggest that Australians may show greater strength of preference for end-weight in the dative-shift alternation than Americans, an effect of group that is compatible with exposure to differing prior distributions but not at all predicted by constrained capacity. If preference is variable by individual but consistent across constructions—as the core of the present work indicates—might we expect the same at the varietal level? An additional experiment conducted here with American, British, and Australian groups and across four different constructions finds that the Australian preference for end-weight is significantly stronger across the set of constructions. While constrained capacity may be at play in variation by individual, the cross-varietal results support the role of learning by exposure to prior distribution, with syntactic neighborhood effects appearing cross-construction for both individuals and groups.

There is some debate surrounding the cognitive resources underlying backwards digit recall. Some researchers consider it to differ from forwards digit recall due to the involvement of executive  control, while others suggest that backwards recall involves visuo-spatial resources. Four experiments therefore investigated the role of executive-attentional and visuo-spatial resources in both forwards and backwards digit recall. In the first, participants completed visuo-spatial 0-back and 2-back tasks during the encoding of information to be remembered. The concurrent tasks did not differentially disrupt performance on backwards digit recall relative to forwards digit recall. Experiment 2 shifted concurrent load to the recall phase instead, and in this case revealed a larger effect of both tasks on backwards recall relative to forwards recall, suggesting that backwards recall may draw on additional resources during the recall phase and that these resources are visuo-spatial in nature. Experiments 3 and 4 then further investigated the role of visual processes in forwards and backwards recall using dynamic visual noise (DVN). In Experiment 3 DVN was presented during encoding of information to be remembered, and had no effect upon performance. However, in Experiment 4 it was presented during the recall phase, and the results provided evidence of a role for visual imagery in backwards digit recall. These results were replicated in Experiment 5 in which the same list length was used for forwards and backwards recall tasks. The findings are discussed in terms of both theoretical and practical implications.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of instrumental music on memory. For this purpose, 42 subjects performed a verbal memory task in Spanish. Each subject was asked to memorize and recall a list of 12 words while listening to three different instrumental songs. Degree of persistence of each musical motif was measured by the effective duration of the autocorrelation function and, later, compared with subjective responses. Results showed that musical motif with the lowest value had a negative effect on the number of recalled words. Nevertheless, musical motifs A and B, which had different value, did not show significant difference. Suggestions about future research are presented to further comprehend the effect of instrumental music on memory.
Resumen - El objetivo de esta investigación es analizar el efecto que tiene la música instrumental en la memoria. Para este propósito, 42 sujetos realizaron un test de memoria verbal en español. A cada sujeto se le solicitó memorizar y recordar un listado de 12 palabras mientras escuchaban tres canciones instrumentales diferentes. Para analizar el grado de persistencia de cada motivo musical se obtuvo la duración efectiva de la función de auto correlación. Posteriormente, estos valores fueron comparados con las respuestas subjetivas. Los resultados mostraron que el motivo musical con el menor valor de generó un efecto negativo en la cantidad de palabras recordadas. Sin embargo, los motivos musicales A y B, con diferentes valores de , no mostraron una diferencia significativa en los resultados subjetivos. Por último, se presentan sugerencias acerca de investigaciones futuras para poder comprender en mayor profundidad el efecto que la música instrumental genera en la memoria.

On the basis of a review of the extant literature describing emotion– cognition interactions, the authors propose 4 methodological desiderata for studying how task-irrelevant affect modulates cognition and present data from an experiment satisfying them. Consistent with accounts of the hemispheric asymmetries characterizing withdrawal-related negative affect and visuospatial working memory (WM) in prefrontal and parietal cortices, threat-induced anxiety selectively disrupted accuracy of spatial but not verbal WM performance. Furthermore, individual differences in physiological measures of anxiety statistically mediated the degree of disruption. A second experiment revealed that individuals characterized by high levels of behavioral inhibition exhibited more intense anxiety and relatively worse spatial WM performance in the absence of threat, solidifying the authors’ inference that anxiety causally mediates disruption. These observations suggest a revision of extant models of how anxiety sculpts cognition and underscore the utility of the desiderata. Keywords: anxiety, working memory prefrontal cortex (PFC), hemispheric asymmetries, facial electromyography (EMG)

Neurocognitive deficits in schizophrenia can reach 1 to 2 standard deviations below healthy controls. The comparative effect of typical and atypical antipsychotic medications on neurocognition is controversial, and based primarily on studies with small samples and large doses of typical comparator medications. The present study assessed neurocognitive efficacy. It was hypothesized that olanzapine treatment would improve neurocognitive deficits to a greater degree than either risperidone or haloperidol treatment. This was a double-blind, randomized, controlled, parallel study with neurocognition assessed at baseline, and 8, 24, and 52 weeks. Per protocol, the haloperidol arm was discontinued. Four hundred and fourteen inpatients or outpatients with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder were treated with oral olanzapine (n = 159), risperidone (n = 158), or haloperidol (n = 97). Individual domains (executive function, learning and memory, processing speed, attention/vigilance, ver...

A battery of neuropsychological measures considered sensitive to dysfunction in prefrontal or temporal cortices was administered to patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and healthy controls. BPD patients exhibited striking deficits on measures of nonverbal executive function and nonverbal memory but were unimpaired on tests of alternation learning, response inhibition, divergent thinking, verbal fluency, and verbal working memory. A second study found that university students obtaining high scores on a self-report measure of BPD symptoms exhibited a similar pattern of neuropsychological impairment, although performance deficits were much less pronounced in the student sample. Taken together, these studies suggest that dysfunction of a right hemisphere frontotemporal regions may be associated with borderline personality.

The listening span task is a measure of working memory that requires participants to process sets of increasing numbers of utterances and store the last word of each utterance for recall at the end of each set. Measures to date have contained an exceedingly demanding processing component, possibly leading to insufficient resources to meet the word recall requirement, which may have affected the sensitivity of the measure to distinguish different levels of working memory. Further, tasks thus far have asked participants to verify the content utterances based on knowledge, which may have confounded the measurement of working memory capacity with world knowledge. An additional weakness is that they lack sound psychometric construct validity evidence, which clouds what these tools actually measure. This pilot study presents a listening span task that accounts for preceding methodological shortcomings, which was administered to 31 Japanese junior high school students. The participants listened to ten sets (two sets of equal length of two, three, four, five and six utterances) of short casual utterances, judged whether they made sense in Japanese, and recalled the last word of each utterance in the set. Performance was assessed through a scoring procedure new to listening span tasks in which credit is given for the words recalled in order of appearance until memory failure. The data was analyzed through the Rasch model, which produces evidence for different aspects of validity and indicates if the items in a test measure a unidimensional construct. The results provided validity evidence for the use of the new listening span task and revealed that the instrument measured a single unidimensional construct.

We used optical neuroimaging to explore the extent of functional overlap between working memory (WM) networks involved in language and Early Stone Age toolmaking behaviors. Oldowan tool production activates two verbal WM areas, but the functions of these areas are indistinguishable from general auditory WM, suggesting that the first hominin toolmakers relied on early precursors of verbal WM to make simple flake tools. Early Acheulian toolmaking elicits activity in a region bordering on Broca's area that is involved in both visual and verbal WM tasks. The sensorimotor and mirror neurons in this area, along with enhancement of general WM capabilities around 1.8 million years ago, may have provided the scaffolding upon which a WM network dedicated to processing exclusively linguistic information could evolve. In the road map going forward, neuro-archaeologists should investigate the trajectory of WM over the course of human evolution to better understand its contribution to language origins.