PSYC327 & PSYC45 Session 2 2022

Pool of essay exam questions

Visual memory and face recognition (Simone’s topics):

1. Explain the roles of timing, stimulus complexity, and spatial location in

defining visual working memory. Refer to experimental evidence in your
explanation.

2. What happens to memory in the misinformation effect? Based on the

evidence, would you conclude that memories can be altered or that access
to memory impaired? - Topic 2.1
- Memory is constructive
- While recent research shows high level of visual detail in visual
LTM (Brady et al, 2008), memory is rarely eidetic
- Encoded information is supplemented by logic and general
knowledge
- Misinformation Effect: New (usually misguiding) information interferes
with an existing memory
- Study by Loftus & Palmer (1974) to test for misinformation , also
found out about alteration hypothesis
- Showed a slide show of a car crash
- Then asked “How fast were the cars going when they:
- Smashed? 40.8 mph
- Collided? 39.3
- Bumped? 38.1
- Hit? 34.0
- Contacted? 31.8
- When the word ‘smash’ was used, people were provided
of a much higher speed
- Anchoring effect ; all youre doing is responding to the
question rather than anything to do about memory
- So Loftus & Palmer did Experiment 2!
- Same slideshow
 - Asked “How fast were the cars going when they
“smashed” or “hit” or no question (control).
- One week later, asked: “Did you see any broken glass?”

-
- Evidence for alteration hypothesis
- Alteration Hypothesis
- New information (misinformation) replaces or overwrites old
information
- “Destructive updating”
- Blending effects (Loftus, 1977)
- Video of green car driving past an accident scene
- Misinformed group: “did the (blue) car have ski racks?”
- Control group: “did the car have ski racks?”
- Misinformation was the color of the car
- Subjects had to choose color of car from 30 alternatives
ranging from green to blue
- Suggested that it is Compromised memory, very heavily
altered by this misinformation
- Misinformed participants (“blue”) recall car as
bluish-green, a compromise memory
- Evidence that memory can be altered by
misinformation - as the memory to extents were
merged by the new information
- Coexistence Hypothesis
- Old information remains in memory but we can’t access it
because of the new information (misinformation)
- Retrieval effect
- Misinformation produced by source errors in accessing relevant
information
- Bekerian and Bowers (1983)
- Participants shown slides of a car-pedestrian accident
- Memory tested in original sequence (control) or random
order (test group)
 - Misleading questions only produced misinformation
effect when tested in random order
- Reinstating the event context at retrieval (cues to recall)
increased the performance of misinformed Ps to that of
control
- Absence of cues to memory in random order group that
lead to misinformation effect
- When people are not able to source memory or
cueing the appropriate piece of memory does
misinformation effect occur
- Source misattribution error
- Confusion over the source of origin of items
- We misattribute the source of different pieces of information
- Real, imagined, suggested
- Misattribution more likely if content is similar
- Conceptually, visually, semantically, temporally
- Stereotypes, schema
- Modified Test Procedure* ( leading to misattribution)
- McCloskey & Zaragoza (1985)
- Misinformation effect influenced by social demand and
response biases – no memory impairment
- A bias to respond in a way that is socially desirable
- If no initial memory of the crucial event could be biased
toward (answer that experimenter is looking for) or
guess the misinformation
- Conducted a misinformation experiment with a novel
option -> no misinformation effect
- Subjects asked whether they saw a hammer or a wrench
- At the test, the participants were asked if they saw
hammer or a wrench, no mention of screw drivers
- Suggesting they had been no alteration to memory
- If people can remember = they are just guessing
- Conclude
- Based on evidence yes, we can conclude that memories can be
altered or that access to memory impaired
3. Compare and contrast familiar and unfamiliar face recognition. What do
viewpoint and lighting effects in unfamiliar face recognition tell us about the
visual representations of faces? - Topic 2.2
- Compare and contrast familiar and unfamiliar face recognition
- Facial recognition involves within-category discrimination
- Everybody has same facial structure (eyes, ears, lips), the fact
that we can tell faces
- We are discriminating between these catagories
- Seems easy but some face recognition tasks can be difficult
- We confuse our ability to recognise familiar faces and ability to
recognise unfamiliar faces
- Unfamiliar & Familiar Face Recognition
- Identity, is either familiar to you or not
- Continuum of familiarity or exposure
- Seen once vs many (thousands?) of times
- Familiar: Social interaction, watching TV/entertainment
- Unfamiliar: Eyewitness memory, matching photos of suspects,
cashiers, border security
- Unfamiliar Face Recognition is error prone
- Even in ideal image conditions
- Pairwise matching
- Live person or video
- How do we learn faces? How does unfamiliar become familiar?
- Transition from image bound to stable and generalizable
representations
- Simple exposure? Not quite, if you see the same image of the
same person a few times, its not gonna do much to better
recognise the face
- Role of variability to encode the faces
- Familiar face recognition
- Robust
- Quick and accurate
- Occurs without consciousness
- Peripheral vision
- Partial, degraded and distorted images
- Viewpoint
- Hill, Schyns & Akamatsu (1997)
 - Learning & sequential matching tasks
- Shaded 3D face models (hair removed)
- Views every 45°from right profile 180° through to left profile
- Viewpoint dependent performance
- Face recognition is the angular upon the view of the face
being seen
- Favelle, Palmisano & Avery (2011)
- Pitch, Yaw & Roll axes
- Sequential matching task
- matching to and from a full face view
- Photos of real people
- Performance depends on angle and axis of rotation
- Rate of decline is dependent viewpoint
- Pitch: worst performance with view from above and below
- The direction of rotation and angle of rotation is important
- up /down rotation gives you the worst performance ; lose alot
of face information
- Lighting effects in unfamiliar face recognition
- Hill & Bruce (1996)
- Recognition better with top lighting than bottom lighting (Hill &
Bruce, 1996)
- Familiar and unfamiliar faces
- Matching tasks
- Favelle, Hill & Claes (2017)
- Effects of change in lighting angle similar (but lower
magnitude) to change in viewpoint
- Match to sample 2AFC
- Negation effect
- Bruce & Langton (1994)
 -
- Effect of lighting
- 2 possible sources of information adversely affected:
- Pigmentation = skin and hair colour & variations in these.
- Pattern of shading and shadow which may help specify
3D structure of face
- Conclude (what this suggest about face representations)
- Viewpoint effects
- Are closely tied to original image properties (view,
image-based)
- Upright
- Lighting & Pigmentation effects
- Include surface characteristics (pigmentation, shading)
- Preserve 3D shape information
 4. Faces that are statistically average and symmetrical are typically judged to
be more attractive than faces that do not have these properties. Discuss this
finding and outline two different accounts for this pattern of results. Which
of these two accounts is more strongly supported by empirical evidence?
-Topic 3.2

Attractiveness - What makes a face attractive?

● Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?
● Everybody has a diff idea of what beauty is
● Averageness, there isnt any consistency
○ Average faces are attractive
■ A statistical average - discovered by Sir Francis Galton
● Wanted to know if there was any face structure be
similar to certain categories
● Middle pic : average face, the morphing of all the
other faces
● The morph face seemed more attractive than the
individual faces used.
● An “average” face is
○ more readily classified as a face
○ easy to process as it resembles mental representations of faces
(face space models)
● Why is average attractive?
● Perceptual bias explanation
○ Based on the idea that faces must be stores as an average (face
space in visual system - centre in the face space is the average
of all the faces you have encountered and the rest are stored
around in that area)
○ More closely resembles the mental representation of all faces
thus why we find average attractive
● Evolutionary explanation
○ Average faces are seen more attractive for mate selection
● Mate selection
● Facial averageness signals:
 ○ genetic heterozygosity associated with a strong immune system,
which is attractive in potential mates (Rhodes, et al, 2002;
Thornhill & Gangestad, 1993)
○ Normal development in a healthy environment, protected from
disease; access to nutrition and healthcare
■ Looks good for mate selection

Symmetry
a. Faces have bilateral symmetry (line down the face so left and
right side should be close to equal)
b. Asymmetric would be more likely to be judged as less attractive.
c. Asymmetry in faces imply some impairment in development
●
Why is symmetry attractive?
● Perceptual bias – the human visual system likes symmetry, aesthetics
(nature & art)
○ Aesthetically pleasing.
● Evolutionary advantage – symmetry indicates good genes and
development
● Little and Jones (2003) symmetrical face advantage for upright but
not inverted faces
○ Test rating of attractiveness of upright inverted faces
○ Upright faces/symmetrical were judged more attractive
compared to inverted faces
○ Does not support perceptual explanation for symmetry in facial
unattractiveness

Conclusion

● Comparing the empirical support for averageness being attractive

compared to symmetrical being attractive, there is stronger evidence
supporting average being more attractive.
5. Outline the argument for a processing mechanism specific to faces. What is
the strongest piece of evidence for the idea that faces are special and why?
- Topic 4.2

Face processing is

● Important for social interactions (we use, signal and look for the
information to guide interactions)
○ Helps eliminate bias
○ Helps disambiguate tones/informations
○ Facetime!
○ Face recognition is something we can do from very early on in
life
● Among the different types of face featural information, a distinction
has been made between the internal face features (eyes, nose, and
mouth) and the external features (hairstyle and jaw-line). While both
types of featural information are important for face recognition, the
internal features are considered to be more critical in adult face
processing expertise

- Holistic = “integration across the area of the face, or processing of the

relationships between features as well as, or instead of, the features
themselves” (Watson & Robbins, 2014, p. 1). Is faster because features are
processed parallel not individually
● Configural processing = refer to any phenomenon that involves
perceiving relations among the features of a stimulus such as a face.
○ Scrambled-blurred task (Schwaninger et al 2002) Match-to-sample
task = configural/featural
○ Part whole task - the subject briefly studies a whole target face and
is required to identify this face when tested or either two whole
faces that differ in the eyes, nose, or mouth parts or two sets of
eyes, noses, or mouths in isolation
● Study for configural processing : Bartlett & Searcy (1993)
○ “Thatcherised” and non-Thatcherised faces
○ Measured ‘grotesqueness’ of the face
○ Ratings of faces pleasant to grotesque
 ○ Thatcherised faces much more grotesque upright than inverted
○ Their results supported the “configural processing hypothesis”
○ We have difficulty processing the configuration of features when
faces are inverted
○ Configural information: how different parts of the face go together
○ When faces are inverted you are just taking note of the different
parts
○ When faces are inverted we tend to analyse features
independently (a bit like we do for objects)
● Conclusion
○ Evidence suggests that we rely heavily on holistic and configural
information for processing upright faces

Faces are “special”

● Faces are a special visual stimulus
● Unique visual processing mechanisms for determining the identity of faces
○ Not used for other kinds of objects
○ Indicates that faces are special

Evidence For: Faces are special

● Faces vs objects
● Babies love faces
○ Simion & Di Giorgio (2015)
○ Top down asymmetry that babies
prefer. Like more things at the top of
the stimuli - they will preferentially
look at that stimuli.
○ Pair A: bilateral symmetry Pair B
does not but despite this babies will
be drawn to stimuli that has more
stuff at the top of the stimulus than
at the bottom of it } up down asymmetry
○ Pair D & E: tests for congruency
○ Pair G: real faces aren’t preferred to ones that have top-down
asymmetry and congruency
- Are not doing complex processing of faces
- Have perceptual bias to what looks like a
face (more things on the wider part of the
face)
● Twin studies & heritability
○ Strong genetic evidence for facial
recognition ability
○ Wilmer et al (2010)
○ Specific cognitive processes may be
heritable
○ High correlations between MZ twins
for CFMT
○ Low correlations between CFMT and visual and verbal recognition
tests
● Neuropsychological evidence
● Behavioural experiments (faces vs objects)
○ Inversion effect
○ Holistic processing
● Imaging evidence
● Conclusion
○ Hereby we can conclude that configural processing is specific to
faces. The strongest piece of evidence that faces are special is the
study by simion & di Giorgio which explained about babies being able
to recognize faces. .
Working memory (Leonie’s topics):

1. Describe the word length effect and explain how this phenomenon was
argued to support the articulatory loop as a model of verbal STM. What
later research on the word length effect disconfirms this approach and
what does this mean for the phonological loop as a model? - Topic 5.3
- Word length effect: Baddeley, Thomson and Buchanan (1975)
- length of time taken to say items used in a serial recall task
determines recall performance
- longer words are harder to recall
- Articulatory loop
- proposed to explain performance in short-term verbal
memory tasks (serial recall)
- span type task or fixed list length task
- originally conceived of as a single component analogous to
a loop of magnetic tape
- finite duration and capacity
- length of the loop determined by the decay rate
(duration)
- Maintaining a phone number in your head before you
can record it elsewhere
- When loop is full?
- Cannot retain item representations in a fully intact
state
- Rehearse and refresh some items
- Others suffer decay
- Evidence for phonological loop
- What forms the argument for why the
articulatory/phonological loop is a plausible model of
verbal STM?
- nature of errors
- interference/disruption effects
- stimuli /conditions that alter performance
- Study to prove:
- Conrad (1963, 1964)
- intrusion errors on a visual letter span task are
acoustically related to the target letter not
 visually related and correlate with errors in
auditory letter identification
- An example
- XQMRBJ
- more likely to mishear ‘B' as 'T' than ‘H' or
‘Z' or 'R'
- don't mistake 'Q' for 'O' or 'C‘
- With verbal stimuli, the sound of items is more
important than their visual appearance
- Drewnowski and Murdock (1980)
- gave subjects lists of two syllable words in a
serial recall task
- intruded words share phonological
features with the target words which they
replace
- E.g. ‘confuse’ would be recalled as ‘abuse’
- When items are incorrectly recalled, quite often
they share phonemic content with the target
item
- Phonemic similarity effect
- Conrad & Hull (1964)
- Lists of similar and dissimilar letters
- Baddeley (1966)
- performance in a serial recall task is
worse if the items are phonemically
similar than if they are phonemically
dissimilar
- 6 item lists from the sets
- Similar (mad, man, mat, map, cad,
can, cat, cap)
- Dissimilar (cow, day, bar, few, hot,
pen, sup, pit)
- When items in the same list share phonemic
information, they are harder to recall in order
than when the list items are phonemically
distinct
- A function of decay and interference
 - Loss of item information across time
- Interference as a consequence of similarity
- Inability to identify between remaining fragments of
items and difficulty ‘keeping items apart’
- Order memory is compromised
- Articulatory suppression
- the repetition of irrelevant verbal material during
presentation (and sometimes recall)
- Murray (1967) - AS results in decrement in serial recall
- articulation of the irrelevant word fills up the articulatory
loop and prevents rehearsal of the tobe-remembered items
- if so AS should abolish the word length and phonemic
similarity effects
- Articulatory suppression abolish word length effect?
- Baddeley et al. (1975) found AS abolishes word length effect
for visual presentation but not auditory presentation
- Baddeley, Lewis and Vallar (1984) found AS does abolish
word length effect for auditory presentation if it continues
through recall period
- Does AS abolish the PS effect?
- Phonemic similarity effect is abolished by AS for visual
presentation only, regardless of whether it continues
through recall or not
2. Describe some of the short-comings of Baddeley’s working memory
model in relation to verbal short-term memory, and the empirical data
related to these short-comings.
- The model proposes that every component of working memory
has a limited capacity, and that the components are relatively
independent of each other.
- For verbal STM, the phonological loop is a component of working
memory model that deals with spoken and written material. It is
subdivided into the phonological store (which holds information in a
speech-based from) and the articulatory process (which allows us
to repeat verbal information in the loop)
- Phonological store (inner ear) processes speech perception
and stores spoken words we hear for 1-2 seconds
- Articulatory control process (inner voice) processes speech
production, and rehearses and stores verbal information
from the phonological store
- HOWEVER changing state hypothesis emphasises the importance
of change in auditory signal producing interference
- Not only speech gains access to the phonological store in the
phonological loop
- Not just phonemes
- Possibly sub-phonemic information – transitions between
frequencies, sound properties
- Salame and Baddeley (1989) found vocal music produced as much
impairment as unattended speech
- Non-vocal music produced a smaller but still significant
degree of impairment
- Some forms of irrelevant external acoustic information
can impair serial recall performance
- Further investigation (using AS) led to the conclusion that the
phonological loop must have more than one component
- Phonological short-term store
- Rehearsal loop
3. Outline the Supervisory Attentional System component of Norman and
Shallice’s model of control of action as an explanation of the operation of
the central executive in non-routine situations. Describe how this thinking
has been applied to particular groups of individuals with impaired WM
function (i.e. the approach to the problem, choice of tasks etc.). - Topic 6.3
4. A number of disorders exhibit an impairment of working memory
function. Select three (3) disorders, and in each (i) identify the nature of
the working memory impairment and (ii) provide empirical evidence that
supports this claim. - Topic 7.1
● Adhd
○ Adhd children have difficulty with
■ Self-regulation
■ Inhibiting impulsive responding
■ Controlling attention etc.
■ Consistent with an impairment of executive processing
○ Executive processing in ADHD
■ Bayliss and Roodenrys (2000)
■ 3 groups
● ADHD
● Learning Disability
● Control
■ Tasks
● Star counting tasks
○ Supervisory Attentional System (SAS) required
to inhibit ongoing counting process and activate
opposite process
■ ADHD mean score performed lower
○ Hayling sentence completion task
○ Random generation task
■ Adhd more poorly under conditions where
they had to produce numbers in 1-2s
○ Spatial anticipation test
■ Learn a specific pattern and predict next
element
 ● SAS impairment would be evident
in random responses and impulsive
guesses
■ ADHD children performed worse on
● SCT
● Hayling
● Random generation
■ But showed no impairment on the rule learning task
■ ADHD children specifically impaired on inhibition tasks ADHD
deficit consistent with an impairment to the SAS
■ Fractionation of the SAS

Down Syndrome

Down Syndrome
● Down syndrome Baddeley & Jarrold (2007)
○ 1 in 700/1000 live births
○ Abnormalities in chromosome 21
○ Affects physical and cognitive development
○ Mild to severe intellectual impairment
○ Considerable variation in specific impairments (especially language)
● Problems in verbal STM
○ Digit span measures reliably lower than matched controls of similar
mental age
○ No such impairment with spatial STM (Corsi blocks)
Corsi blocks

Down Syndrome
● Laws (2002) – memory for sequences of colours
○ Two conditions
■ Focal colours...red green blue
■ Colours that are hard to label
○ Impaired memory for the nameable but not unnameable colours
○ Excludes poor auditory perception as a possible explanation of digit
span deficit
Memory for colour sequences

Down Syndrome
 ● Baddeley & Jarrold (2007)
○ What is the source of the impairment with verbal items?
○ Presenting visual displays of to-be-remembered information (digits)
with auditory presentation in digit span does not improve verbal
performance
○ Removing the requirement to produce verbal output does not
improve performance
■ Not a reflection of speech production
○ Down syndrome associated with a deficit in the phonological loop
● Baddeley & Jarrold (2007)
○ 1. Perhaps Down syndrome individuals do not rehearse, or rehearse
efficiently (a loop deficit)?
○ Some DS individuals have overt speech rates comparable to controls
○ Failure to rehearse might be a developmental issue
■ Typically developing children do not rehearse until about 7
years of age
■ However comparisons between DS individuals of a mental age
less than 7 and their matched controls still show a deficit
○ 2. An impairment in the phonological store?
■ Gathercole & Baddeley (1990)
■ Could it be....
● Inefficient acoustic analysis of phonological information?
○ Not a strong correlation between hearing loss and
verbal STM measures
● Atypically rapid loss of information?
○ They are affected by the length of time
information is maintained
○ But, no more so than for controls
● Reduced capacity?
Down Syndrome and CE
● Lanfranchi et al. (2004)
● Verbal and visuospatial working memory tasks
○ Varied demands on executive processing
○ For example
■ Recalling a list of words
■ Recalling the first word of each of a series of lists
 ■ Recalling the first word of each of a series of lists and tapping
the table when a keyword was presented
○ Higher executive loads increased the difference in performance
between Down syndrome and control groups
● Central executive impairment associated with Down syndrome
○ Associated with performing dual tasks

Depression

Depression and autobiographical memory – a working memory perspective

● Individuals with depression are more likely to exhibit overgeneral memory
○ Reduced autobiographical memory specificity
○ Tend to retrieve memories from higher levels in the self-memory
system (autobiographical memory)
○ Leads to deficits
○ Difficulties in problem solving
○ Can’t access specific information that might guide resolution
○ Influences ability to imagine future events
● Over general memory in depression – a WM perspective
● (Broadway et al., 2010)
○ This explanation focusses on affective component of disorder
○ But – depression also affects WM performance (William et al., 2006)
○ Performance on autobiographical memory test (AMT) predicted by
verbal fluency – even if the severity of depression is taken into
account (control for the level of depression)
● Dalgleish et al., (2007)
○ Reversed requirement of AMT – produce general memories
○ Depressives performed worse than controls
■ More specific memories were produced – suggests impaired
executive control/WM function co-exists with depression
■ Impairment in WM functioning can lead to over general
memories in depressed individuals – individuals have
insufficient capacity to inhibit activation from other levels in the
system, therefore less able to produce information that would
be more appropriate to the task (which is a function of WM)
Alzheimer’s
● Frontal lobes thought to be the seat of the executive functions
 ○ Dementia is associated with plaques and tangles in the brain more
densely concentrated in the frontal lobes
● Morris (1984) found that Alzheimer’s patients
○ Show a reduced memory span but
○ Show word-length, phonological similarity and AS effects
■ Markers of function of the phonological loop
● Alzheimer’s dementia as an impairment of the central executive
○ Coordination is seen as an executive process
■ Engaging in a dual task
○ How is coordination of tasks affected by Alzheimer’s?
■ Baddeley et al 1986 -> coordination ~ dual task paradigm
● Main task pursuit tracking (approx. 50% time on target)
● Secondary tasks
○ AS
○ RT to Tones
○ Memory span – list length set to maximum span of
individual
■ Baddeley et al (1991)
● Longitudinal study of alzheimer’s patients
○ Performance on individual tasks
○ Performance on combined tasks continued to
deteriorate
○ Central Executive appears to be sensitive to the
effects of alzheimer’s disease
■ Huntley and howard (2010)
● Intervening research Is broadly consistent with these
findings
○ Impairment in the central executive, particularly
with respect to divided attention and the ability to
coordinate 2 tasks
 5. Does training working memory produce benefits for higher cognitive
abilities? Support your answer with both empirical evidence and
theoretical argument. - Topic 7.2

WMC is associated with other higher

cognitive abilities (Engle, Tuholski,
Laughlin &
Conway 1999) ~ WM = STM + attentional
control

● Rationale = brain neuroplasticity is

induced by exposure to repeated and challenging practice
● Klingberg (2010)
○ Training on specific tasks in animals and humans can result in
performance improvements – a range of neural changes in the brain
○ E.g., perceptual training
■ Involves repetitive activity, feedback, and a gradual increase in
difficulty
■ Can produce long-lasting neuronal changes to cortical regions
associated with sensory processing
○ Argument that neuroplasticity from training is also possible in brain
regions that are associated with higher-order processes (WM)
● Training programs should not teach explicit strategies
○ That training should be dedicated to WM tasks so that itis
concentrated on WM-common activity
○ That training should be administered using computerised tasks that
adapt to task performance
● Neuroimaging evidence – brain activity during WM tasks of differing
modalities – some activity is modality – or domain-specific (typically
activation in the sensory cortices)
○ Other areas are commonly activated by WM tasks (the intraparietal
cortex and the dorsolateral cortex) – activation in this common WM
region has been found to explain differences between individuals on
WM performance is thought to be related to the control of attention
■ Accordingly, the neuroplasticity argument assumes that WM
training could:
● Result in neural changes to the regions thought to be
responsible for the control of attention
 ● Produce performance benefits across all tasks that
require this capacity, irrespective of task-specifics
● Positive reports (training WM benefit for higher cognitive ability)
1. Klingberg, Forsberg & Westberg (2002) showed transfer to a
non-trained shortterm memory task and a fluid intelligence measure
with ADHD children
○ Adaptive WM training, 30-40minutes/day 5 days/week for 5 weeks
○ Small samples (n=7 for treatment and active control)
○ WM training was also associated with head movement (directly
observable)
2. Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, Jonidas & Perrig (2008)
○ Transfer to fluid intelligence with healthy young adults
○ Included no treatment control (n=35 in training and no training
groups)
○ Maximum training was 8 hours on a dual n-back (two modalities)
■ More training associated with greater transfer gains
● Summary for both studies: Such studies assume that an increase in WMC
underlies the transfer of improved performance from the trained to the
untrained tasks
3. Redick et al. (2012) – a randomised, placebo-controlled study
Examined the relationship between working memory training and
gains on intelligence measures
○ Conditions
■ Treatment
■ Active control (visual search training)
■ No-contact control groups
○ Average 10-15 hours of practice distributed as 20 sessions over 6-7
weeks
○ WM training task was an adaptive dual n-back, using two modalities
■ Requires the participant to judge whether each stimulus is the
same stimulus as the stimulus n stimuli back in the sequence
● Includes memory updating and coordination
○ Several WM tasks were used to test near transfer – testing the latent
construct of WM (domain-general ability)
○ Far transfer was assessed using several forms of fluid intelligence test
(spatial, verbal and numerical) and multiple multitasking tests
○ Results:
 ■ Training gains (improvements on training tasks) were observe
in both the dual n-back and visual search training groups
● If you train on a task you get better at it
○ Learning effects

Theory argument
Overgeneral memory in depression - a working memory perspective (Broadway et
al., 2010)
● Depression has impared working memory/ executive control
○ It focuses on general memory instead of autobiographical memory
○ As autobiographical memory can give a solution, they tend to lack in
that perspective as they are focusing on GM
○ This supports that tey have imapred WM
Multicomponent view of working memory (Baddeley, 2000)
○ Multi component model of WM Baddeley & Hitch (1974)
■ Tripartite model of WM
■ Separation of short term stores from LTM
■ 2 slave systems and the attentional control of action (CE with
general processing capacity/storage)
○ Multicomponent version
○ Fractionating the CE (see lecture next week)
■ No additional storage
○ Includes the interface with LTM
● The episodic buffer
○ Encoding relies on the subcomponents (verbal, visuo spatial, LTM) and
is directed by the CE
○ Information is maintained by attentional refreshing
○ Retrieval is through conscious awareness (CE)
○ Information is represented via a multidimensional code (sensory
systems, WM components, LTM)
○ Baddeley (2012) states that some binding can occur without attention,
but the maintenance of the contents in the episodic buffer relies on
attentional control

The Embedded Processes model of working memory (Cowan, 1999; 2005)

○ Functional definition any processing mechanisms that contribute to
the temporary availability of information form part of the working
memory system
■ cognitive processes that retain information in an unusually
accessible state
■ supports tasks like language comprehension or production,
problem solving, decision making, or other thought
○ How does information become activated?
■ Conscious processing of information
■ Externally examining stimuli via
● Directed attention
● Involuntary attention orienting response (versus
habituation)
■ Internally awareness of internal thought
● Recall of information from LTM
● Creation of links between pieces of information,
formation of chunks (aha! moments)
○ Information as part of awareness of surroundings
■ Objects in the environment that are not directly attended to
■ Objects that do not change over time will be habituated to
● Dropped from conscious awareness
● Lower level of activation
○ Information that is implicitly activated in LTM by the conscious
contents of WM
○ How does information lose activation?
■ When the focus of attention moves away from the activated
information
■ Lose activation over time due to decay
○ How does information maintain activation?
■ Keeping it in the focus of attention
■ Rehearsal
■ Attentional refreshing
● Reactivating decaying activations by passing through
the focus of attention
● Covert rehearsal
Conclusion : Hereby we conclude that, training WM will give higher cognitive
abilities, as supported by the empirical evidence and theoretical argument as
mentioned above.