Asymmetrical interference between item and order information in short-term memory.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Guitard D
PROVIDER: S-EPMC7963515 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Recently, Guitard et al. (2021) used a two-list procedure and varied the kind of encoding carried out for each list (item or order encoding). They found dual-list impairment on an order test was consistently greater when the other list was also encoded for an order test, compared to when it was in the presence of another list encoded for an item test. They also found a dual-list cost relative to one list for both order and item information. Here we address the bases of the interference costs with a novel task in which, prior to each list presentation, participants are instructed to expect an item fragment completion test, an order reconstruction test, or either type of test. In five experiments, we contrast two competing accounts of item and order processing, the conflicting representation hypothesis and the common resource hypothesis. An asymmetry with larger dual-attention costs on order compared to item tests was found, with the effect magnitude changing with task conditions. Our results support a version of the common resource hypothesis in which both item and order processing occur no matter which test is expected, but in which additional processing is divided between item and order codes in a manner that depends on task demands.
| S-EPMC9435734 | biostudies-literature
Project description:In immediate memory for verbal lists, recently it has been shown that participants can choose to carry out encoding that prioritises readiness for an item test at some cost to order information or, conversely, that prioritises readiness for an order test at a cost to item information. Here, we ask whether participants can control attention to items and order in a graded fashion. We examined this issue by manipulating the percentage of order or item test trials participants would receive in a block (for each type of test, 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100% of the trials in a block). Overall, the results revealed that participants were able to allocate their attention in a fine-grained manner that took into account the trial distribution within the block. However, there was a difference between the effects of allocating attention to item versus order. Divided attention, compared with full attention to one attribute, had an asymmetry, such that divided attention impaired order performance more than item performance. The exact point at which this asymmetry could be seen differed between two experiments, which included different item tests (fragment completion vs. free recall). The results suggest a common resource for item and order encoding and/or retention in working memory, which can be voluntarily allocated to different mixtures of these two attributes.
| S-EPMC10029108 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Many complex tasks require people to bind individual events into a sequence that can be held in short term memory (STM). For this purpose information about the order of the individual events in the sequence needs to be maintained in an active and accessible form in STM over a period of few seconds. Here we investigated how the temporal order information is shared between the presentation and response phases of an STM task. We trained a classification algorithm on the fMRI activity patterns from the presentation phase of the STM task to predict the order of the items during the subsequent recognition phase. While voxels in a number of brain regions represented positional information during either presentation and recognition phases, only voxels in the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) represented position consistently across task phases. A shared positional code in the ATL might reflect verbal recoding of visual sequences to facilitate the maintenance of order information over several seconds.
| S-EPMC5518770 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Dyscalculia, a specific learning disability that impacts arithmetical skills, has previously been associated to a deficit in the precision of the system that estimates the approximate number of objects in visual scenes (the so called 'number sense' system). However, because in tasks involving numerosity comparisons dyscalculics' judgements appears disproportionally affected by continuous quantitative dimensions (such as the size of the items), an alternative view linked dyscalculia to a domain-general difficulty in inhibiting task-irrelevant responses. To arbitrate between these views, we evaluated the degree of reciprocal interference between numerical and non-numerical quantitative dimensions in adult dyscalculics and matched controls. We used a novel stimulus set orthogonally varying in mean item size and numerosity, putting particular attention into matching both features' perceptual discriminability. Participants compared those stimuli based on each of the two dimensions. While control subjects showed no significant size interference when judging numerosity, dyscalculics' numerosity judgments were strongly biased by the unattended size dimension. Importantly however, both groups showed the same degree of interference from the unattended dimension when judging mean size. Moreover, only the ability to discard the irrelevant size information when comparing numerosity (but not the reverse) significantly predicted calculation ability across subjects. Overall, our results show that numerosity discrimination is less prone to interference than discrimination of another quantitative feature (mean item size) when the perceptual discriminability of these features is matched, as here in control subjects. By quantifying, for the first time, dyscalculic subjects' degree of interference on another orthogonal dimension of the same stimuli, we are able to exclude a domain-general inhibition deficit as explanation for their poor / biased numerical judgement. We suggest that enhanced reliance on non-numerical cues during numerosity discrimination can represent a strategy to cope with a less precise number sense.
| S-EPMC6294370 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Purpose Morse code as a form of communication became widely used for telegraphy, radio and maritime communication, and military operations, and remains popular with ham radio operators. Some skilled users of Morse code are able to comprehend a full sentence as they listen to it, while others must first transcribe the sentence into its written letter sequence. Morse thus provides an interesting opportunity to examine comprehension differences in the context of skilled acoustic perception. Measures of comprehension and short-term memory show a strong correlation across multiple forms of communication. This study tests whether this relationship holds for Morse and investigates its underlying basis. Our analyses examine Morse and speech immediate serial recall, focusing on established markers of echoic storage, phonological-articulatory coding, and lexical-semantic support. We show a relationship between Morse short-term memory and Morse comprehension that is not explained by Morse perceptual fluency. In addition, we find that poorer serial recall for Morse compared to speech is primarily due to poorer item memory for Morse, indicating differences in lexical-semantic support. Interestingly, individual differences in speech item memory are also predictive of individual differences in Morse comprehension. Conclusions We point to a psycholinguistic framework to account for these results, concluding that Morse functions like "reading for the ears" (Maier et al., 2004) and that underlying differences in the integration of phonological and lexical-semantic knowledge impact both short-term memory and comprehension. The results provide insight into individual differences in the comprehension of degraded speech and strategies that build comprehension through listening experience. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.16451868.
| S-EPMC8642092 | biostudies-literature
Project description:A distinction has always been made between long-term and short-term memory (also now called working memory, WM). The obvious difference between these two kinds of memory concerns the duration of information storage: information is supposedly transiently stored in WM while it is considered durably consolidated into long-term memory. It is well acknowledged that the content of WM is erased and reset after a short time, to prevent irrelevant information from proactively interfering with newly stored information. In the present study, we used typical WM radial maze tasks to question the brief lifespan of spatial WM content in rodents. Groups of rats were submitted to one of two different WM tasks in a radial maze: a WM task involving the repetitive presentation of a same pair of arms expected to induce a high level of proactive interference (PI) (HIWM task), or a task using a different pair in each trial expected to induce a low level of PI (LIWM task). Performance was effectively lower in the HIWM group than in LIWM in the final trial of each training session, indicative of a "within-session/short-term" PI effect. However, we also observed a different "between-session/long-term" PI effect between the two groups: while performance of LIWM trained rats remained stable over days, the performance of HIWM rats dropped after 10 days of training, and this impairment was visible from the very first trial of the day, hence not attributable to within-session PI. We also showed that a 24 hour-gap across training sessions known to allow consolidation processes to unfold, was a necessary and sufficient condition for the long-term PI effect to occur. These findings suggest that in the HIWM task, WM content was not entirely reset between training sessions and that, in specific conditions, WM content can outlast its purpose by being stored more permanently, generating a long-term deleterious effect of PI. The alternative explanation is that WM content could be transferred and stored more permanently in an intermediary form or memory between WM and long-term memory.
| S-EPMC5348021 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Philosophers and scientists have puzzled for millennia over how perceptual information is stored in short-term memory. Some have suggested that early sensory representations are involved, but their precise role has remained unclear. The current study asks whether auditory cortex shows sustained frequency-specific activation while sounds are maintained in short-term memory using high-resolution functional MRI (fMRI). Investigating short-term memory representations within regions of human auditory cortex with fMRI has been difficult because of their small size and high anatomical variability between subjects. However, we overcame these constraints by using multivoxel pattern analysis. It clearly revealed frequency-specific activity during the encoding phase of a change detection task, and the degree of this frequency-specific activation was positively related to performance in the task. Although the sounds had to be maintained in memory, activity in auditory cortex was significantly suppressed. Strikingly, patterns of activity in this maintenance period correlated negatively with the patterns evoked by the same frequencies during encoding. Furthermore, individuals who used a rehearsal strategy to remember the sounds showed reduced frequency-specific suppression during the maintenance period. Although negative activations are often disregarded in fMRI research, our findings imply that decreases in blood oxygenation level-dependent response carry important stimulus-specific information and can be related to cognitive processes. We hypothesize that, during auditory change detection, frequency-specific suppression protects short-term memory representations from being overwritten by inhibiting the encoding of interfering sounds.
| S-EPMC3150893 | biostudies-other
Project description:Previous research suggests that there is a limit to the rate at which items can be consolidated in visual short-term memory (VSTM). This limit could be due to either a serial or a limited-capacity parallel process. Historically, it has proven difficult to distinguish between these two types of processes. In the present experiment, we took a novel approach that allowed us to do so. Participants viewed two oriented gratings either sequentially or simultaneously and reported one of the gratings' orientation via method of adjustment. Performance was worse for the simultaneous than for the sequential condition. We fit the data with a mixture model that assumes performance is limited by a noisy memory representation plus random guessing. Critically, the serial and limited-capacity parallel processes made distinct predictions regarding the model's guessing and memory-precision parameters. We found strong support for a serial process, which implies that one can consolidate only a single orientation into VSTM at a time.
| S-EPMC4082725 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Decades of research using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm have demonstrated that episodic memory is vulnerable to semantic distortion, and neuroimaging investigations of this phenomenon have shown dissociations between the neural mechanisms subserving true and false retrieval from long-term memory. Recently, false short-term memories have also been demonstrated, with false recognition of items related in meaning to memoranda encoded less than 5s earlier. Semantic interference is also evident in short-term memory, such that correct rejection of related lures is slowed relative to correct rejection of unrelated lures. The present research constitutes the first fMRI investigation of false recognition and semantic interference in short-term memory using a short-term DRM paradigm in which participants retained 4 semantic associates over a short 4-s filled retention interval. Results showed increased activation in the left mid-ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (BA45) associated with semantic interference, and significant correlations between these increases and behavioral measures of interference across subjects. Furthermore, increases in dorsolateral PFC occurred when related lures were correctly rejected versus falsely remembered. Compared with false recognition, true recognition was associated with increases in left fusiform gyrus, a finding consistent with the notion that increased perceptual processing may distinguish true from false recognition over both short and long retention intervals. Findings are discussed in relation to current models of interference resolution in short-term memory, and suggest that false short-term recognition occurs as a consequence of the failure of frontally mediated cognitive control processes which adjudicate semantic familiarity in support of accurate mnemonic retrieval.
| S-EPMC4472385 | biostudies-literature
Project description:In children with dyslexia, deficits in working memory have not been well-specified. We assessed second-grade children with dyslexia, with and without concomitant specific language impairment, and children with typical development. Immediate serial recall of lists of phonological (non-word), lexical (digit), spatial (location) and visual (shape) items were included. For the latter three modalities, we used not only standard span but also running span tasks, in which the list length was unpredictable to limit mnemonic strategies. Non-word repetition tests indicated a phonological memory deficit in children with dyslexia alone compared with those with typical development, but this difference vanished when these groups were matched for non-verbal intelligence and language. Theoretically important deficits in serial order memory in dyslexic children, however, persisted relative to matched typically developing children. The deficits were in recall of (1) spoken digits in both standard and running span tasks and (2) spatial locations, in running span only. Children with dyslexia with versus without language impairment, when matched on non-verbal intelligence, had comparable serial order memory, but differed in phonology. Because serial orderings of verbal and spatial elements occur in reading, the careful examination of order memory may allow a deeper understanding of dyslexia and its relation to language impairment. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
| S-EPMC5540735 | biostudies-literature