Since antiquity, philosophers, theologians, and scientists have been interested in human memory; however, researchers today are still working to understand the capabilities, boundaries, and architecture. While the storage capabilities of long-term memory are seemingly unlimited (Bahrick, 1984), working memory, or the ability to maintain and manipulate information held in memory, seems to have stringent capacity limits (e.g., Cowan, 2001). Individual differences, however, do exist and these differences can often predict performance on a wide variety of tasks (cf. Engle, 2001). Recently, researchers have promoted the enticing possibility that simple behavioral training can expand the limits of working memory which indeed may also lead to improvements on other cognitive processes as well (cf. Morrison&Chein, 2011). The current study investigated this possibility. Recommendations from the skill training literature (cf. Schneider, 1985) were incorporated to create optimized verbal and spatial working memory training tasks. Significant performance improvements were evident across eight days of cognitive training using verbal and spatial adaptive n-back procedures. Training-related improvements were also evident for some untrained measures of visual short-term memory, attentional control, and working memory. These training effects, however, were not universal. Other measures of visual short-term memory and attentional control, as well as measures of fluid intelligence were unaffected by training.

Diss. Linköping : Linköpings universitet, 2007.

This study investigated the relationship between working memory and language in typically developing young children. The aim was to gain a better understanding of language development, in particular, the involvement of visual and verbal short-term memory in language acquisition and its influence on vocabulary size. It explored possible underlying causes of why some children have problems in the process of learning to talk, whereas other children acquire language easily. A total of 51 New Zealand English speaking children aged two to five completed a battery of assessments measuring receptive and expressive vocabulary and visual and verbal short-term memory. The standardized tests administered included the Receptive One Word Picture Vocabulary Test (Brownell, 2000b), the Expressive One Word Picture Vocabulary Test (Brownell, 2000a), the Visual Patterns Test (Stokes, Klee, Cruickshank, & Pleass, 2009), and the Test of Early Nonword Repetition (Stokes & Klee, 2009a). Receptive vocabulary knowledge was strongly associated with visual (r = .75) and verbal (r = .60) short-term memory performance and age (r = .72). The relationship of expressive vocabulary to visual short-term memory (r = .80) was stronger than to verbal short-term memory (r = .62) but significant for both and also for age (r= .83). Significant unique predictors for expressive vocabulary were age (R2 change = .60) as well as visual (R2 change = .04) and verbal (R2 change = .04) short-term memory. However, age appeared to be the only unique predictor for receptive vocabulary (R2 change = .54). In addition, the findings suggested that visual and verbal short-term memory increases as children get older. Hence, the Visual Patterns Test and Test of Early Nonword Repetition seem to be good predictors, over and above age, of expressive vocabulary knowledge.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Full text release at OhioLINK's ETD Center delayed at author's request

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2010. / Directed by Michael Kane; submitted to the Dept. of Psychology. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Jul. 13, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 59-73).

This study sought to investigate the influence of expressive task demand, as determined by amount of face-to face social interaction, level of subjects' expressive ability, sex of subject, and sex of experimenter on subjects' digit and visual-spatial short-term memory span performance. The amount of personal contact was manipulated by the automated versus person administrations of the memory measures. The automated administration was accomplished through the use of a microcomputer.

This research explores auditory short-term memory (STM) capacity for non-linguistic sounds in 10-month-old infants. Infants were presented with auditory streams composed of repeating sequences of either 2 or 4 unique instruments (e.g., flute, piano, cello; 350 or 700. ms in duration) followed by a 500-ms retention interval. These instrument sequences either stayed the same for every repetition (Constant) or changed by 1 instrument per sequence (Varying). Using the head-turn preference procedure, infant listening durations were recorded for each stream type (2- or 4-instrument sequences composed of 350- or 700-ms notes). Preference for the Varying stream was taken as evidence of auditory STM because detection of the novel instrument required memory for all of the instruments in a given sequence. Results demonstrate that infants listened longer to Varying streams for 2-instrument sequences, but not 4-instrument sequences, composed of 350-ms notes (Experiment 1), although this effect did not hold when note durations were increased to 700. ms (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 replicates and extends results from Experiments 1 and 2 and provides support for a duration account of capacity limits in infant auditory STM.

Several experiments are presented to evaluate the development of visuo-spatial short term memory from childhood to old age (from five-year-olds to about 70-year-olds). Visuospatial short term memory was assessed through transformational imagery tasks. The first set of experiments (chapters 3, 4 and 5) concerned the development of mental rotation abilities. A review of the literature suggested that young children (specifically so-called preoperational children) and elderly people are poor at rotating a mental image of a visual pattern. However, as some mental rotation abilities have been reported while using Shepard's paradigm, attention was focussed on the role of the first steps necessarily taken while performing a mental rotation task, specifically the maintenance of a visual pattern in STM. The second set of experiments (chapter 6) considered another imagery subsystem, namely "mental scanning". Like mental rotation, it requires the maintenance of a visual pattern in short term memory. Image maintenance ability has been assessed in reference to Kosslyn's (1994) model although Baddeley's (1986) working memory model- specifically, Logie's (1995) revision of the VSSP - has been sometimes considered while interpreting the data. These two different theoretical models suggest the existence of two related but different subsystems for sorting visual and spatial information. Most of the data presented in this thesis suggest that young children and the elderly have some difficulties maintaining spatial characteristics of a visual pattern in short term memory, i.e. the orientation of the stimulus in the mental rotation tasks and the location of targets in the mental scanning tasks. These results tend to provide some developmental evidence for a dissociation between the dorsal and ventral subsystems. It seems that the two subsystems develop at different speeds. The ventral subsystem might be better developed earlier than the dorsal subsystem. Similarly, some data suggest that the same ventral system is not yet affected by ageing when the dorsal subsystem has already begun to deteriorate.

published_or_final_version / Psychology / Master / Master of Philosophy

This study evaluated the effectiveness of an instructional programme designed to improve the regulatory fit of, and lessen the working memory demand upon, students in the process of second language (L2) writing. Drawing on the theoretical understanding of regulatory focus theory (RFT) and cognitive process of writing, a quasi-experiment with control group was designed and testified on 138 secondary school students in Hong Kong over a period of 16 weeks. The findings suggest that the aforementioned instructional design is effective in promoting students’ writing performance in terms of quality, creativity and accuracy. The pretest-posttest gains exhibited in the experimental group suggest that the students were able to internalize the writing instruction, self-regulate their writing processes, and benefit from it. In hierarchical regression, working memory explained unique variances in the control group but not in the experimental group, perhaps because the writing instruction rendered working memory constraint unimportant. The results not only offer empirical support for the application of RFT in education settings, but also inspire teachers with ways to improve students’ writing performance by fine adjustment in writing activities and grading system. / published_or_final_version / Educational Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences