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Separability of active semantic and phonological maintenance in verbal working memory.

ABSTRACT: Models of verbal working memory that incorporate active memory maintenance, long-term memory networks, and attention control have been developed. Current studies suggest that semantic representations of words, evoked via long-term memory networks, are actively maintained until they are needed to fulfill a role. In other words, it is possible that some mechanism actively refreshes semantic representations of words, analogous to but independently from articulatory rehearsal which refreshes phonological representations. One valuable piece of evidence is a double dissociation, observed in a dual task paradigm in which manual tapping disrupted a semantic memory task while articulatory suppression disrupted a phonological memory task. However, in that study, the secondary tasks could have competed not only with the maintenance but also with the encoding activities. Additionally, the study items in the phonological memory tasks were words; hence, the discriminability of the memory tasks is doubtful. The present study, therefore, examined a potential double dissociation in situations where the secondary tasks could not compete with encoding, using a modified phonological memory task. Furthermore, this article discusses a potential mechanism for maintaining semantic representations.

SUBMITTER: Nishiyama R

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5841779 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Separability of active semantic and phonological maintenance in verbal working memory.

Nishiyama Ryoji R

PloS one 20180307 3

Models of verbal working memory that incorporate active memory maintenance, long-term memory networks, and attention control have been developed. Current studies suggest that semantic representations of words, evoked via long-term memory networks, are actively maintained until they are needed to fulfill a role. In other words, it is possible that some mechanism actively refreshes semantic representations of words, analogous to but independently from articulatory rehearsal which refreshes phonolo ...[more]

PMID: 29513731

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Project description:Cognitive Reserve (CR), according to a recent consensus definition of the NIH-funded Reserve and Resilience collaboratory, is constituted by any mechanism contributing to cognitive performance beyond, or interacting with, brain structure in the widest sense. To identity multivariate activation patterns fulfilling this postulate, we investigated a verbal Sternberg fMRI task and imaged 181 people with age coverage in the ranges 20-30 (44 participants) and 55-70 (137 participants). Beyond task performance, participants were characterized in terms of demographics, and neuropsychological assessments of vocabulary, episodic memory, perceptual speed, and abstract fluid reasoning. Participants studied an array of either one, three, or six upper-case letters for 3 s (=encoding phase), then a blank fixation screen was presented for 7 s (=maintenance phase), to be probed with a lower-case letter to which they responded with a differential button press whether the letter was part of the studied array or not (=retrieval phase). We focused on identifying maintenance-related activation patterns showing memory load increases in pattern score on an individual participant level for both age groups. We found such a pattern that increased with memory load for all but one person in the young participants (p < 0.001), and such a pattern for all participants in the older group (p < 0.001). Both patterns showed broad topographic similarities; however, relationships to task performance and neuropsychological characteristics were markedly different and point to individual differences in Cognitive Reserve. Beyond the derivation of group-level activation patterns, we also investigated the inter-subject spatial similarity of individual working memory rehearsal patterns in the older participants' group as a function of neuropsychological and task performance, education, and mean cortical thickness. Higher task accuracy and neuropsychological function was reliably associated with higher inter-subject similarity of individual-level activation patterns in older participants.

Dataset Information

Separability of active semantic and phonological maintenance in verbal working memory.

Publications

Separability of active semantic and phonological maintenance in verbal working memory.

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