The ability to flexibly retrieve and implement sequences of actions is essential to motor learnin... more The ability to flexibly retrieve and implement sequences of actions is essential to motor learning and planning. Recent research has indicated that serial memory for instructions is influenced by presentation modality (spoken vs. visual demonstration) and recall modality (verbal vs. enacted recall). The present study extended this work by investigating the impact of recall direction (forward vs. backward), in addition to that of presentation and recall modality, on working memory for instruction sequences in healthy young adults. Experiment 1 (N = 24) showed that adults were more accurate in backward than forward verbal recall following spoken instructions. In contrast, enacted recall was not influenced by recall direction. Experiment 2 (N = 24) used visual demonstration of instruction sequences and found similar performance levels in forward and backward recall. Experiment 3 (N = 24) replicated the findings from Experiment 1 and 2, along with the previous observation of an advantag...
Recent behavioural and biological evidence indicates common mechanisms serving working memory and... more Recent behavioural and biological evidence indicates common mechanisms serving working memory and attention (eg Awh et al, 2006 Neuroscience139 201–208). This study explored the role of spatial attention and visual search in an adapted Corsi spatial memory task. Eye movements and touch responses were recorded from participants who recalled locations (signalled by colour or shape change) from an array presented either simultaneously or sequentially. The time delay between target presentation and recall (0,5, or 10 s) and the number of locations to be remembered (2–5) were also manipulated. Analysis of the response phase revealed subjects were less accurate (touch data) and fixated longer (eye data) when responding to sequentially presented targets suggesting higher cognitive effort. Fixation duration on target at recall was also influenced by whether spatial location was initially signalled by colour or shape change. Finally, we found that the sequence tasks encouraged longer fixatio...
The episodic buffer component of working memory is assumed to play a central role in the binding ... more The episodic buffer component of working memory is assumed to play a central role in the binding of features into objects, a process that was initially assumed to depend upon executive resources. Here, we review a program of work in which we specifically tested this assumption by studying the effects of a range of attentionally demanding concurrent tasks on the capacity to encode and retain both individual features and bound objects. We found no differential effect of concurrent load, even when the process of binding was made more demanding by separating the shape and color features spatially, temporally or across visual and auditory modalities. Bound features were however more readily disrupted by subsequent stimuli, a process we studied using a suffix paradigm. This suggested a need to assume a feature-based attentional filter followed by an object based storage process. Our results are interpreted within a modified version of the multicomponent working memory model. We also discuss work examining the role of the hippocampus in visual feature binding.
Items with high value are often remembered better than those with low value. It is not clear, how... more Items with high value are often remembered better than those with low value. It is not clear, however, whether this value effect extends to the binding of associative details (e.g., word colour) in episodic memory. Here, we explored whether value enhances memory for associative information in two different scenarios that might support a more effective process of binding between identity and colour. Experiment 1 examined incidental binding between item and colour using coloured images of familiar objects, whereas Experiment 2 examined intentional learning of word colour. In both experiments, increasing value led to improvements in memory for both item and colour, and these effects persisted after approximately 24 hr. Experiment 3a and Experiment 3b replicated the value effect on intentional word–colour memory from Experiment 2 while also demonstrating this effect to be less reliable when word colour is incidental to the encoding phase. Thus, value-directed prioritisation can facilita...
Oberauer (2019) maps out different perspectives that have emerged in exploring working memory and... more Oberauer (2019) maps out different perspectives that have emerged in exploring working memory and attention, and suggests particular ways in which these key aspects of cognition might operate in the service of successful goal completion. One question that is central to Oberauer's review and to the field more generally concerns how automatic and controlled attention interact with each other and with working memory. In line with this, recent research indicates that both forms of attention can operate within the same task to determine whether information is maintained in working memory. Perceptual attention can be automatically captured by environmental input, resulting in superior recall for the most recent stimulus, along with unwanted disruption by distracting stimuli. Effortful top-down control, powered by executive resources, operates within this context to create and maintain task goals, and to support the maintenance of target information in an accessible state, particularly if it is of greater value/goal relevance. The relationship between working memory and attention has been the focus of a wealth of research over recent years, in efforts to understand how these core components of cognitive function might operate and whether they might be conceptualized as part of the same broad system responsible for driving perception, thought, and action. Oberauer (2019) sets out a timely review of relevant literature and a new taxonomy, with a view to better describing and understanding this relationship. The starting point lies at a possible distinction between two broad approaches, namely, attention as a limited resource and as selective information processing. This is indeed a useful distinction to draw in helping characterize different perspectives within the literature, though each of these viewpoints are clearly likely to have value. Attention is a limited resource, placing constraints on how many 'non-perceptual' items can be maintained, and thus contributing to the limited capacity typically seen as a hallmark of working memory. This limited capacity then underlines the importance of appropriate 'perceptual' selection to meet task goals and avoid non-perceptual, mnemonic representations being overloaded and displaced. Indeed, bottlenecks at encoding and consolidation are a useful constraining factor in controlling undesired representational turnover. In this way, limits on both control and selection might work reciprocally. The end result is an efficient system that makes the most of its' constraints, optimizing performance by retaining recent and salient information (automatically derived from the environment) and/or information aligned to current goals (selected through controlled processing). It remains to be seen whether limits operate on the control of processes, as suggested by Oberauer, or on the processes themselves, though empirically distinguishing between these possibilities may prove challenging. Evidence from dual-task methodology indicates that a domain-general, executive-related form of attention contributes to
We review our research on the episodic buffer in the multicomponent model of working memory (Badd... more We review our research on the episodic buffer in the multicomponent model of working memory (Baddeley, 2000), making explicit the influence of Anne Treisman's work on the way our research has developed. The crucial linking theme concerns binding, whereby the individual features of an episode are combined as integrated representations. We summarize a series of experiments on visual working memory that investigated the retention of feature bindings and individual features. The effects of cognitive load, perceptual distraction, prioritization, serial position, and their interactions form a coherent pattern. We interpret our findings as demonstrating contrasting roles of externally driven and internally driven attentional processes, as well as a distinction between visual buffer storage and the focus of attention. Our account has strong links with Treisman's concept of focused attention and aligns with a number of contemporary approaches to visual working memory.
Temporal lobe epilepsy a b s t r a c t While most individuals who have problems acquiring new inf... more Temporal lobe epilepsy a b s t r a c t While most individuals who have problems acquiring new information forget at a normal rate, there have been reports of patients who show much more rapid forgetting, particularly comprising a subsample of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. Currently available tests are generally not designed to test this since it requires multiple different tests of the same material. We describe two tests that aim to fill this gap, one verbal, the Crimes Test, the other visual, the Four Doors Test. Each test involves four scenes comprising five features. In each case, this allows four tests of 20 different questions to be produced and used at four different delays. Two experiments were run, each comprising a multi-test condition in which immediate testing was followed by retesting after 24 h, one week and one month, and a second condition involving a single test after one month. Both the visual and verbal tests showed clear evidence of forgetting in the single test condition, together with little evidence of forgetting in the multi-test conditions. We suggest that the testing of individual features encourages participants to remember the whole episode which then acts as a further reminder. Further research is needed to decide whether this serendipitous lack of forgetting in healthy individuals (decelerated long-term forgetting) will provide an ideal test of accelerated long-term forgetting by avoiding the danger of floor effects, or whether it will simply prove to be a further complication. Theoretical implications are discussed, as well as possible ways ahead in further investigating the surprisingly neglected field of long-term forgetting.
The ability to flexibly retrieve and implement sequences of actions is essential to motor learnin... more The ability to flexibly retrieve and implement sequences of actions is essential to motor learning and planning. Recent research has indicated that serial memory for instructions is influenced by presentation modality (spoken vs. visual demonstration) and recall modality (verbal vs. enacted recall). The present study extended this work by investigating the impact of recall direction (forward vs. backward), in addition to that of presentation and recall modality, on working memory for instruction sequences in healthy young adults. Experiment 1 (N = 24) showed that adults were more accurate in backward than forward verbal recall following spoken instructions. In contrast, enacted recall was not influenced by recall direction. Experiment 2 (N = 24) used visual demonstration of instruction sequences and found similar performance levels in forward and backward recall. Experiment 3 (N = 24) replicated the findings from Experiment 1 and 2, along with the previous observation of an advantage for demonstrated over spoken presentation. In addition, the beneficial effects of enacted recall and visual demonstration also emerged in an analysis of response times, specifically in reduced preparation and recall duration. Demonstrated instructions improved maintenance of all items while backward recall enhanced memory of later items in the sequence. These findings provide new insights into the cognitive processes and temporal dynamics of working memory for serial actions and instructions.
Some activities can be meaningfully dichotomised as 'cognitive' or 'sensorimotor' in nature-but m... more Some activities can be meaningfully dichotomised as 'cognitive' or 'sensorimotor' in nature-but many cannot. This has radical implications for understanding activity limitation in disability. For example, older adults take longer to learn the serial order of a complex sequence but also exhibit slower, more variable and inaccurate motor performance. So is their impaired skill acquisition a cognitive or motor deficit? We modelled sequence learning as a process involving a limited capacity buffer (working memory), where reduced performance restricts the number of elements that can be stored. To test this model, we examined the relationship between motor performance and sequence learning. Experiment 1 established that older adults were worse at learning the serial order of a complex sequence. Experiment 2 found that participants showed impaired sequence learning when the non-preferred hand was used. Experiment 3 confirmed that serial order learning is impaired when motor demands increase (as the model predicted). These results can be captured by reinforcement learning frameworks which suggest sequence learning will be constrained both by an individual's sen-sorimotor ability and cognitive capacity.
Research has shown that adults can engage in cognitive offloading, whereby internal processes are... more Research has shown that adults can engage in cognitive offloading, whereby internal processes are offloaded onto the environment to help task performance. Here, we investigate an application of this approach with children, in particular children with poor working memory. Participants were required to remember and recall sequences of colors by placing colored blocks in the correct serial order. In one condition the blocks were arranged to facilitate cognitive offloading (i.e., grouped by color), whereas in the other condition they were arranged randomly. Across two experiments (total N = 166) the ordered condition improved task performance for children with low working memory ability. In addition, participants in Experiment 2 rated the difficulty of the two arrangements and performed a further condition in which they were given an opportunity to freely arrange the blocks before completing the task. Despite performing better in the ordered condition, children with low working memory ability did not rate the ordered arrangement as easier, nor did they choose an ordered arrangement when given the opportunity to do so. This research shows that cognitive offloading can also be a useful process in populations other than typical adults, and the implications of this work for supporting children with poor working memory are discussed.
By investigating the effect of individualized verbal load on a visual working memory task, we inv... more By investigating the effect of individualized verbal load on a visual working memory task, we investigated whether working memory is better captured by modality-specific stores or a general attentional resource. A visual measure was used that allows for the precision of representations in working memory to be quantified. Bayesian analyses were employed to contrast the likelihood of our data assuming a small versus a large effect, as predicted by the differing accounts. We found evidence that the effect of verbal load on visual precision and binary feature recall was small. The results were indeterminate for the size of the dual task effect on verbal accuracy and the probability of recalling a continuous target feature. These results, in part, support a multiple component account of working memory. An analysis of how the chosen effect intervals affect the results is also reported, highlighting the importance of making specific predictions in the literature.
The term 'modal model' reflects the importance of Atkinson and Shiffrin's paper in capturing the ... more The term 'modal model' reflects the importance of Atkinson and Shiffrin's paper in capturing the major developments in the cognitive psychology of memory that were achieved over the previous decade, providing an integrated framework that has formed the basis for many future developments. The fact that it is still the most cited model from that period some 50 years later has, we suggest, implications for the model itself and for theorising in psychology more generally. We review the essential foundations of the model before going on to discuss briefly the way in which one of its components, the short-term store, had influenced our own concept of a multicomponent working memory. This is followed by a discussion of recent claims that the concept of a short-term store be replaced by an interpretation in terms of activated long-term memory. We present several reasons to question these proposals. We conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of the longevity of the modal model for styles of theorising in cognitive psychology.
Across the lifespan the ability to follow instructions is essential for the successful completion... more Across the lifespan the ability to follow instructions is essential for the successful completion of a multitude of daily activities. This ability will often rely on the storage and processing of information in working memory, and previous research in this domain has found that self-enactment at encoding or observing other-enactment at encoding (demonstration) improves performance at recall. However, no working memory research has directly compared these manipulations. Experiment 1 explored the effects of both self-enactment and demonstration on young adults' (N=48) recall of action-object instruction sequences (e.g. 'spin the circle, tap the square'). Both manipulations improved recall, with demonstration providing relatively larger boosts to performance across conditions. More detailed analyses suggested that this improvement was driven by improving the representations of actions, rather than objects, in these action-object sequences. Experiment 2 (N=24) explored this further, removing the objects from the physical environment and comparing partial demonstration (i.e. action-only or object-only) with no or full demonstration. The results showed that partial demonstration only benefitted features that were demonstrated, while full demonstration improved memory for actions, objects and their pairings. Overall these experiments indicate how self-enactment, and particularly demonstration, can benefit verbal recall of instruction sequences through the engagement of visuo-motor processes that provide additional forms of coding to support working memory performance.
An emerging literature indicates that working memory and attention interact in determining what i... more An emerging literature indicates that working memory and attention interact in determining what is retained over time, though the nature of this relationship and the impacts on performance across different task contexts remain to be mapped out. In the present study, four experiments examined whether participants can prioritize one or more ‘high reward’ items within a four-item target array for the purposes of an immediate cued recall task, and the extent to which this mediates the disruptive impact of a post-display to-be-ignored suffix. All four experiments indicated that endogenous direction of attention towards high-reward items results in their improved recall. Furthermore, increasing the number of high-reward items from 1 to 3 (Experiments 1-3) produces no decline in recall performance for those items, while associating each item in an array with a different reward value results in correspondingly graded levels of recall performance (Experiment 4). These results suggest the ability to exert precise voluntary control in the prioritization of multiple targets. However, in line with recent outcomes drawn from serial visual memory, this endogenously driven focus on high-reward items results in greater susceptibility to exogenous suffix interference, relative to low-reward items. This contrasts with outcomes from cueing paradigms, indicating that different methods of attentional direction may not always result in equivalent outcomes on working memory performance.
Previous research on memory for a short sequence of visual stimuli indicates that access to the f... more Previous research on memory for a short sequence of visual stimuli indicates that access to the focus of attention (FoA) can be achieved in either of two ways. The first is automatic and is indexed by the recency effect, the enhanced retention of the final item. The second is strategic and based on instructions to prioritize items differentially, a process that draws on executive capacity and boosts retention of information deemed important. In both cases, the increased level of retention can be selectively reduced by presenting a poststimulus distractor (or suffix). We manipulated these variables across three experiments. Experiment 1 generalized previous evidence that prioritizing a single item enhances its retention and increases its vulnerability to interference from a poststimulus suffix. A second experiment showed that the enhancement from prioritizing one or two items comes at a cost to the recency effect. A third experiment showed that prioritizing two items renders memory for both vulnerable to interference from an irrelevant suffix. The results suggest that some but not all items in working memory compete to occupy a narrow FoA and that this competition is determined by a combination of perceptually driven recency and internal executive control.
The ability to flexibly retrieve and implement sequences of actions is essential to motor learnin... more The ability to flexibly retrieve and implement sequences of actions is essential to motor learning and planning. Recent research has indicated that serial memory for instructions is influenced by presentation modality (spoken vs. visual demonstration) and recall modality (verbal vs. enacted recall). The present study extended this work by investigating the impact of recall direction (forward vs. backward), in addition to that of presentation and recall modality, on working memory for instruction sequences in healthy young adults. Experiment 1 (N = 24) showed that adults were more accurate in backward than forward verbal recall following spoken instructions. In contrast, enacted recall was not influenced by recall direction. Experiment 2 (N = 24) used visual demonstration of instruction sequences and found similar performance levels in forward and backward recall. Experiment 3 (N = 24) replicated the findings from Experiment 1 and 2, along with the previous observation of an advantag...
Recent behavioural and biological evidence indicates common mechanisms serving working memory and... more Recent behavioural and biological evidence indicates common mechanisms serving working memory and attention (eg Awh et al, 2006 Neuroscience139 201–208). This study explored the role of spatial attention and visual search in an adapted Corsi spatial memory task. Eye movements and touch responses were recorded from participants who recalled locations (signalled by colour or shape change) from an array presented either simultaneously or sequentially. The time delay between target presentation and recall (0,5, or 10 s) and the number of locations to be remembered (2–5) were also manipulated. Analysis of the response phase revealed subjects were less accurate (touch data) and fixated longer (eye data) when responding to sequentially presented targets suggesting higher cognitive effort. Fixation duration on target at recall was also influenced by whether spatial location was initially signalled by colour or shape change. Finally, we found that the sequence tasks encouraged longer fixatio...
The episodic buffer component of working memory is assumed to play a central role in the binding ... more The episodic buffer component of working memory is assumed to play a central role in the binding of features into objects, a process that was initially assumed to depend upon executive resources. Here, we review a program of work in which we specifically tested this assumption by studying the effects of a range of attentionally demanding concurrent tasks on the capacity to encode and retain both individual features and bound objects. We found no differential effect of concurrent load, even when the process of binding was made more demanding by separating the shape and color features spatially, temporally or across visual and auditory modalities. Bound features were however more readily disrupted by subsequent stimuli, a process we studied using a suffix paradigm. This suggested a need to assume a feature-based attentional filter followed by an object based storage process. Our results are interpreted within a modified version of the multicomponent working memory model. We also discuss work examining the role of the hippocampus in visual feature binding.
Items with high value are often remembered better than those with low value. It is not clear, how... more Items with high value are often remembered better than those with low value. It is not clear, however, whether this value effect extends to the binding of associative details (e.g., word colour) in episodic memory. Here, we explored whether value enhances memory for associative information in two different scenarios that might support a more effective process of binding between identity and colour. Experiment 1 examined incidental binding between item and colour using coloured images of familiar objects, whereas Experiment 2 examined intentional learning of word colour. In both experiments, increasing value led to improvements in memory for both item and colour, and these effects persisted after approximately 24 hr. Experiment 3a and Experiment 3b replicated the value effect on intentional word–colour memory from Experiment 2 while also demonstrating this effect to be less reliable when word colour is incidental to the encoding phase. Thus, value-directed prioritisation can facilita...
Oberauer (2019) maps out different perspectives that have emerged in exploring working memory and... more Oberauer (2019) maps out different perspectives that have emerged in exploring working memory and attention, and suggests particular ways in which these key aspects of cognition might operate in the service of successful goal completion. One question that is central to Oberauer's review and to the field more generally concerns how automatic and controlled attention interact with each other and with working memory. In line with this, recent research indicates that both forms of attention can operate within the same task to determine whether information is maintained in working memory. Perceptual attention can be automatically captured by environmental input, resulting in superior recall for the most recent stimulus, along with unwanted disruption by distracting stimuli. Effortful top-down control, powered by executive resources, operates within this context to create and maintain task goals, and to support the maintenance of target information in an accessible state, particularly if it is of greater value/goal relevance. The relationship between working memory and attention has been the focus of a wealth of research over recent years, in efforts to understand how these core components of cognitive function might operate and whether they might be conceptualized as part of the same broad system responsible for driving perception, thought, and action. Oberauer (2019) sets out a timely review of relevant literature and a new taxonomy, with a view to better describing and understanding this relationship. The starting point lies at a possible distinction between two broad approaches, namely, attention as a limited resource and as selective information processing. This is indeed a useful distinction to draw in helping characterize different perspectives within the literature, though each of these viewpoints are clearly likely to have value. Attention is a limited resource, placing constraints on how many 'non-perceptual' items can be maintained, and thus contributing to the limited capacity typically seen as a hallmark of working memory. This limited capacity then underlines the importance of appropriate 'perceptual' selection to meet task goals and avoid non-perceptual, mnemonic representations being overloaded and displaced. Indeed, bottlenecks at encoding and consolidation are a useful constraining factor in controlling undesired representational turnover. In this way, limits on both control and selection might work reciprocally. The end result is an efficient system that makes the most of its' constraints, optimizing performance by retaining recent and salient information (automatically derived from the environment) and/or information aligned to current goals (selected through controlled processing). It remains to be seen whether limits operate on the control of processes, as suggested by Oberauer, or on the processes themselves, though empirically distinguishing between these possibilities may prove challenging. Evidence from dual-task methodology indicates that a domain-general, executive-related form of attention contributes to
We review our research on the episodic buffer in the multicomponent model of working memory (Badd... more We review our research on the episodic buffer in the multicomponent model of working memory (Baddeley, 2000), making explicit the influence of Anne Treisman's work on the way our research has developed. The crucial linking theme concerns binding, whereby the individual features of an episode are combined as integrated representations. We summarize a series of experiments on visual working memory that investigated the retention of feature bindings and individual features. The effects of cognitive load, perceptual distraction, prioritization, serial position, and their interactions form a coherent pattern. We interpret our findings as demonstrating contrasting roles of externally driven and internally driven attentional processes, as well as a distinction between visual buffer storage and the focus of attention. Our account has strong links with Treisman's concept of focused attention and aligns with a number of contemporary approaches to visual working memory.
Temporal lobe epilepsy a b s t r a c t While most individuals who have problems acquiring new inf... more Temporal lobe epilepsy a b s t r a c t While most individuals who have problems acquiring new information forget at a normal rate, there have been reports of patients who show much more rapid forgetting, particularly comprising a subsample of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. Currently available tests are generally not designed to test this since it requires multiple different tests of the same material. We describe two tests that aim to fill this gap, one verbal, the Crimes Test, the other visual, the Four Doors Test. Each test involves four scenes comprising five features. In each case, this allows four tests of 20 different questions to be produced and used at four different delays. Two experiments were run, each comprising a multi-test condition in which immediate testing was followed by retesting after 24 h, one week and one month, and a second condition involving a single test after one month. Both the visual and verbal tests showed clear evidence of forgetting in the single test condition, together with little evidence of forgetting in the multi-test conditions. We suggest that the testing of individual features encourages participants to remember the whole episode which then acts as a further reminder. Further research is needed to decide whether this serendipitous lack of forgetting in healthy individuals (decelerated long-term forgetting) will provide an ideal test of accelerated long-term forgetting by avoiding the danger of floor effects, or whether it will simply prove to be a further complication. Theoretical implications are discussed, as well as possible ways ahead in further investigating the surprisingly neglected field of long-term forgetting.
The ability to flexibly retrieve and implement sequences of actions is essential to motor learnin... more The ability to flexibly retrieve and implement sequences of actions is essential to motor learning and planning. Recent research has indicated that serial memory for instructions is influenced by presentation modality (spoken vs. visual demonstration) and recall modality (verbal vs. enacted recall). The present study extended this work by investigating the impact of recall direction (forward vs. backward), in addition to that of presentation and recall modality, on working memory for instruction sequences in healthy young adults. Experiment 1 (N = 24) showed that adults were more accurate in backward than forward verbal recall following spoken instructions. In contrast, enacted recall was not influenced by recall direction. Experiment 2 (N = 24) used visual demonstration of instruction sequences and found similar performance levels in forward and backward recall. Experiment 3 (N = 24) replicated the findings from Experiment 1 and 2, along with the previous observation of an advantage for demonstrated over spoken presentation. In addition, the beneficial effects of enacted recall and visual demonstration also emerged in an analysis of response times, specifically in reduced preparation and recall duration. Demonstrated instructions improved maintenance of all items while backward recall enhanced memory of later items in the sequence. These findings provide new insights into the cognitive processes and temporal dynamics of working memory for serial actions and instructions.
Some activities can be meaningfully dichotomised as 'cognitive' or 'sensorimotor' in nature-but m... more Some activities can be meaningfully dichotomised as 'cognitive' or 'sensorimotor' in nature-but many cannot. This has radical implications for understanding activity limitation in disability. For example, older adults take longer to learn the serial order of a complex sequence but also exhibit slower, more variable and inaccurate motor performance. So is their impaired skill acquisition a cognitive or motor deficit? We modelled sequence learning as a process involving a limited capacity buffer (working memory), where reduced performance restricts the number of elements that can be stored. To test this model, we examined the relationship between motor performance and sequence learning. Experiment 1 established that older adults were worse at learning the serial order of a complex sequence. Experiment 2 found that participants showed impaired sequence learning when the non-preferred hand was used. Experiment 3 confirmed that serial order learning is impaired when motor demands increase (as the model predicted). These results can be captured by reinforcement learning frameworks which suggest sequence learning will be constrained both by an individual's sen-sorimotor ability and cognitive capacity.
Research has shown that adults can engage in cognitive offloading, whereby internal processes are... more Research has shown that adults can engage in cognitive offloading, whereby internal processes are offloaded onto the environment to help task performance. Here, we investigate an application of this approach with children, in particular children with poor working memory. Participants were required to remember and recall sequences of colors by placing colored blocks in the correct serial order. In one condition the blocks were arranged to facilitate cognitive offloading (i.e., grouped by color), whereas in the other condition they were arranged randomly. Across two experiments (total N = 166) the ordered condition improved task performance for children with low working memory ability. In addition, participants in Experiment 2 rated the difficulty of the two arrangements and performed a further condition in which they were given an opportunity to freely arrange the blocks before completing the task. Despite performing better in the ordered condition, children with low working memory ability did not rate the ordered arrangement as easier, nor did they choose an ordered arrangement when given the opportunity to do so. This research shows that cognitive offloading can also be a useful process in populations other than typical adults, and the implications of this work for supporting children with poor working memory are discussed.
By investigating the effect of individualized verbal load on a visual working memory task, we inv... more By investigating the effect of individualized verbal load on a visual working memory task, we investigated whether working memory is better captured by modality-specific stores or a general attentional resource. A visual measure was used that allows for the precision of representations in working memory to be quantified. Bayesian analyses were employed to contrast the likelihood of our data assuming a small versus a large effect, as predicted by the differing accounts. We found evidence that the effect of verbal load on visual precision and binary feature recall was small. The results were indeterminate for the size of the dual task effect on verbal accuracy and the probability of recalling a continuous target feature. These results, in part, support a multiple component account of working memory. An analysis of how the chosen effect intervals affect the results is also reported, highlighting the importance of making specific predictions in the literature.
The term 'modal model' reflects the importance of Atkinson and Shiffrin's paper in capturing the ... more The term 'modal model' reflects the importance of Atkinson and Shiffrin's paper in capturing the major developments in the cognitive psychology of memory that were achieved over the previous decade, providing an integrated framework that has formed the basis for many future developments. The fact that it is still the most cited model from that period some 50 years later has, we suggest, implications for the model itself and for theorising in psychology more generally. We review the essential foundations of the model before going on to discuss briefly the way in which one of its components, the short-term store, had influenced our own concept of a multicomponent working memory. This is followed by a discussion of recent claims that the concept of a short-term store be replaced by an interpretation in terms of activated long-term memory. We present several reasons to question these proposals. We conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of the longevity of the modal model for styles of theorising in cognitive psychology.
Across the lifespan the ability to follow instructions is essential for the successful completion... more Across the lifespan the ability to follow instructions is essential for the successful completion of a multitude of daily activities. This ability will often rely on the storage and processing of information in working memory, and previous research in this domain has found that self-enactment at encoding or observing other-enactment at encoding (demonstration) improves performance at recall. However, no working memory research has directly compared these manipulations. Experiment 1 explored the effects of both self-enactment and demonstration on young adults' (N=48) recall of action-object instruction sequences (e.g. 'spin the circle, tap the square'). Both manipulations improved recall, with demonstration providing relatively larger boosts to performance across conditions. More detailed analyses suggested that this improvement was driven by improving the representations of actions, rather than objects, in these action-object sequences. Experiment 2 (N=24) explored this further, removing the objects from the physical environment and comparing partial demonstration (i.e. action-only or object-only) with no or full demonstration. The results showed that partial demonstration only benefitted features that were demonstrated, while full demonstration improved memory for actions, objects and their pairings. Overall these experiments indicate how self-enactment, and particularly demonstration, can benefit verbal recall of instruction sequences through the engagement of visuo-motor processes that provide additional forms of coding to support working memory performance.
An emerging literature indicates that working memory and attention interact in determining what i... more An emerging literature indicates that working memory and attention interact in determining what is retained over time, though the nature of this relationship and the impacts on performance across different task contexts remain to be mapped out. In the present study, four experiments examined whether participants can prioritize one or more ‘high reward’ items within a four-item target array for the purposes of an immediate cued recall task, and the extent to which this mediates the disruptive impact of a post-display to-be-ignored suffix. All four experiments indicated that endogenous direction of attention towards high-reward items results in their improved recall. Furthermore, increasing the number of high-reward items from 1 to 3 (Experiments 1-3) produces no decline in recall performance for those items, while associating each item in an array with a different reward value results in correspondingly graded levels of recall performance (Experiment 4). These results suggest the ability to exert precise voluntary control in the prioritization of multiple targets. However, in line with recent outcomes drawn from serial visual memory, this endogenously driven focus on high-reward items results in greater susceptibility to exogenous suffix interference, relative to low-reward items. This contrasts with outcomes from cueing paradigms, indicating that different methods of attentional direction may not always result in equivalent outcomes on working memory performance.
Previous research on memory for a short sequence of visual stimuli indicates that access to the f... more Previous research on memory for a short sequence of visual stimuli indicates that access to the focus of attention (FoA) can be achieved in either of two ways. The first is automatic and is indexed by the recency effect, the enhanced retention of the final item. The second is strategic and based on instructions to prioritize items differentially, a process that draws on executive capacity and boosts retention of information deemed important. In both cases, the increased level of retention can be selectively reduced by presenting a poststimulus distractor (or suffix). We manipulated these variables across three experiments. Experiment 1 generalized previous evidence that prioritizing a single item enhances its retention and increases its vulnerability to interference from a poststimulus suffix. A second experiment showed that the enhancement from prioritizing one or two items comes at a cost to the recency effect. A third experiment showed that prioritizing two items renders memory for both vulnerable to interference from an irrelevant suffix. The results suggest that some but not all items in working memory compete to occupy a narrow FoA and that this competition is determined by a combination of perceptually driven recency and internal executive control.
The ability to create temporary binding representations of information from different sources in ... more The ability to create temporary binding representations of information from different sources in working memory has recently been found to relate to the development of mono-lingual word recognition in children. The current study explored this possible relationship in an adult word-learning context. We assessed whether the relationship between cross-modal working memory binding and lexical development would be observed in the learning of associations between unfamiliar spoken words and their semantic referents, and whether it would vary across experimental conditions in first-and second-language word learning. A group of English monolinguals were recruited to learn 24 spoken disyllable Mandarin Chinese words in association with either familiar or novel objects as semantic referents. They also took a working memory task in which their ability to temporarily bind auditory-verbal and visual information was measured. Participants' performance on this task was uniquely linked to their learning and retention of words for both novel objects and for familiar objects. This suggests that, at least for spoken language, cross-modal working memory binding might play a similar role in second language-like (i.e., learning new words for familiar objects) and in more native-like situations (i.e., learning new words for novel objects). Our findings provide new evidence for the role of cross-modal working memory binding in L1 word learning and further indicate that early stages of picture-based word learning in L2 might rely on similar cognitive processes as in L1. Component processes central to the early stages of word learning include the mapping of pronunciations (phonological labels) to their printed words (orthographic forms) and semantic referents (e.g., visual objects for concrete nouns). This may initially involve the processing and temporary storage of pho-nological and visuospatial information, both individually and in combination, within working memory. Previous work has already examined in detail the relationship between word learning and temporary storage and processing of information within isolated domains (i.e., visuospatial or verbal; e.
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Papers by Richard Allen