32, 683–701. (2017). In particular, the theoretical framework behind working memory, in which the related domains that are considered to play a part in different frameworks (such as memory’s capacity limit and temporary storage) are presented and discussed. Particularly, the caudate and thalamus were activated during task encoding, and the medial thalamus during the maintenance phase, while recorded activity in the fronto-parietal network, which includes the DLPFC and the parietal lobules, was observed only during retrieval (Moore et al., 2013). doi: 10.1080/713755608, Baddeley, A. Neuropsychologia visuo – spatial working memory is an important source of domain-general vulnerability in the development of arithmetic cognition. Psychol. As demonstrated in the study using fMRI, the nature of the task (such as verbal or visual-spatial) might have played a role as a higher level of testosterone (in males) correlated with activations of the left inferior parietal cortex, which was deemed a key region in spatial processing that subsequently brought on better performance in a mental-rotation task. Working memory was once considered a gateway into long-term memory, but research today notes a clear difference between long-term and working memory. Aging 53, 93–102. doi: 10.1080/87565640701376086. Tags: Working memory… Importantly, this effect only emerges for negative, but not positive content (see also Joormann & D’Avanzato, 2010; Kaiser, Andrews-Hanna, Metcalf, & Dimidjian, 2015). Working memory training is associated with lower prefrontal cortex activation in a divergent thinking task. Rehearse information in working memory enough and the memory can become more permanent. To solve an arithmetic problem like (3 X 3) + (4 X 2) in your head, for example, you need to keep the intermediate results in mind (i.e., 3 X 3 = 9) to be able to solve the entire problem. Working memory has fascinated scholars since its inception in the 1960’s (Baddeley, 2010; D’Esposito and Postle, 2015). It was speculated that visuospatial working memory plays a vital role when arithmetic problem-solving is involved in order to ensure intact mental representations of the numerical information (Rotzer et al., 2009). This is supported in studies employing neuropsychological testing to assess cognitive impairments in patients with traumatic brain injury; and poorer cognitive performances especially involving the working memory domains were reported (see Review Articles by Dikmen et al., 2009; Dunning et al., 2016; Phillips et al., 2017). On parent and teacher rating scales, high scores on attention problems or academic issues will indicate that working memory measures should administered. Dec. 8, 2020 — Two new studies shed new light on how the brain encodes time and place into memories. 35, 3025–3035. The primary WMI is comprised of Digit Span and Picture Span, which are auditory and visual working memory tasks, respectively. Soc. Nat. Like attention and executive functions, working memory has a significant influence in cognitive efficiency, learning, and academic performance. Such positive results demonstrated effective training gains regardless of age difference that could even be maintained until 18 months later (Dahlin et al., 2008) even though the transfer effects of such training to other working memory tasks need to be further elucidated as strong evidence of transfer with medium to large effect size is lacking (Dahlin et al., 2008; Guye and von Bastian, 2017; Heinzel et al., 2017; see also Karbach and Verhaeghen, 2014). Neuroscience 236, 186–194. Taking the reading span task as an example. Episodic long-term memory is the process of forming memory traces and later retrieving them without continued active maintenance, and it can be used at any time scale (even with brief delays). doi: 10.1177/0956797614548725, Kim, C., Kroger, J. K., Calhoun, V. D., and Clark, V. P. (2015). Besides, low activation in the DMN was observed in mild TBI patients without cognitive recovery, and such results seemed to be useful in predicting recovery in patients in which the patients did not recover when hypoactivation (low activation) was reported, and vice versa (Wylie et al., 2015). Brain Lang. doi: 10.1037/a0014296, Daneman, M., and Carpenter, P. A. (2007). Decoding the underlying neural mechanisms of working memory helps support the current theoretical understandings concerning working memory, and at the same time provides insights into rehabilitation programs that target working memory impairments from neurophysiological or psychological aspects. In particular, several domains of working memory such as the focus of attention (Cowan, 1999, 2008), inhibitory controls (Engle and Kane, 2004), maintenance, manipulation, and updating of information (Baddeley, 2000a, 2010), capacity limits (Cowan, 2005), and episodic buffer (Baddeley, 2000a) were executive processes that relied on executive control efficacy (see also Miyake and Shah, 1999; Barrouillet et al., 2004; D’Esposito and Postle, 2015). Episodic buffer was regarded as a temporary storage system that modulates and integrates different sensory information (Baddeley, 2000a). Thus, the AWMI consists of Digit Span and Letter-Number Sequencing, which are both auditory working memory tasks. It is believed that working memory lays the foundation for many other cognitive controls in humans, and decoding the working memory mechanisms would be the first step in facilitating understanding toward other aspects of human cognition such as perceptual or emotional processing. Age-related alterations in functional connectivity patterns during working memory encoding of emotional items. (2012). This might be suggestive of the potential of cognitive recovery simply by looking at the intensity of brain activation of the DMN, for an increase in activation of the DMN seemed to be superseded before cognitive recovery was present (Wylie et al., 2015). The visual sketchpad allows people to keep visual images and spatial information active in the mind for problem-solving. This memory system is severely limited in capacity (Cowan, 2001), and the capacity limits of the active storage system in particular are closely related to measures of intelligence and academic achievement (Alloway & Alloway, 2010; Cowan, 2005; Fukuda, Vogel, Mayr, & Awh, 2010), suggesting that active storage in visual working memory may be a core cognitive ability that underlies, and constrains, our ability to process information across domains (Brady, Konkle, & Alvarez, 2011). Age-related reduction of BOLD modulation to cognitive difficulty predicts poorer task accuracy and poorer fluid reasoning ability. This type of memory is especially relevant to learning to read, write, and do math, because all of these skills involve learning systems of symbols that are assigned meanings. The participants performed a working memory binding task, whereby they had to make sure that the word-ellipse pairs presented during the retrieval phase were identical to those in the encoding phase in terms of location and verbal information; results concluded that participants with schizophrenia had an overall poorer performance compared to healthy controls when they were asked to actively bind verbal and spatial information (Grot et al., 2017). Controlled Studies. doi: 10.1016/S0022-5371(80)90312-6, D’Esposito, M., and Postle, B. R. (2015). Meanwhile, the study did not manage to obtain the expected outcome in terms of greater clustering of whole-brain connections in TBI participants as hypothesized (Hillary et al., 2011). Traumatic brain injuries (TBI) refer to accidental damage to the brain after being hit by an object or following rapid acceleration or deceleration (Farrer, 2017). J. Neurotrauma 30, 1609–1619. Neurosci. Similar speculation can be made about individuals with schizophrenia. Process overlap theory: a unified account of the general factor of intelligence. J. Cogn. In 2000, post-menopausal women undergoing hormone replacement therapy, specifically estrogen, were found to have better working memory performance in comparison with women who took estrogen and progestin or women who did not receive the therapy (Duff and Hampson, 2000). In short, the central executive functions as the “control center” that oversees manipulation, recall, and processing of information (non-verbal or verbal) for meaningful functions such as decision-making, problem-solving or even manuscript writing. The Reading Span Task, originally designed by Daneman and Carpenter (1980), is widely used to measure verbal WM. Go on, try it! Administration of certain cognitively enhancing drugs such as methylphenidate was reported to be helpful in improving working memory performance too (Manktelow et al., 2017). Her performance suggests uniform memory abilities when she is recalling associations she learned within the past few seconds or minutes or when trying to recall them half an hour later. TABLE 2. WC and AAH contributed to the final version of the manuscript. This Flanker effect has been used to reflect people's ability at focused attention or inhibitory control because shorter responses to the incongruent conditions indicate better interference resistance from the flankers and better focus of attention on the target. Working memory training in older adults: bayesian evidence supporting the absence of transfer. Indeed, more than a century of scientific studies revolving around memory in the fields of psychology, biology, or neuroscience have not completely agreed upon a unified categorization of memory, especially in terms of its functions and mechanisms (Cowan, 2005, 2008; Baddeley, 2010). Unless you cheated (or cleverly spotted a pattern—more on that soon), you would not have been able to retain all those digits and repeat them correctly after closing your book cover. (1999). Sci. Dir. Having identified that the working memory circuitry involves the fronto-parietal region, especially the prefrontal and parietal cortices, in a healthy functioning brain, targeting these areas in order to understand how working memory is affected in a diseased brain might provide an explanation for the underlying deficits observed at the behavioral level. Psychol. Similar findings that demonstrated more pronounced effects of caffeine on elderly participants were reported in an older study, whereas older participants in the age range of 50–65 years old exhibited better working memory performance that offset the cognitive decline observed in those with no caffeine consumption, in addition to displaying shorter reaction times and better motor speeds than observed in those without caffeine (Rees et al., 1999). doi: 10.1162/jocn.2009.21230, Schöning, S., Engelien, A., Kugel, H., Schäfer, S., Schiffbauer, H., Zwitserlood, P., et al. These simple, meaningless stimuli are assumed to best assess the core capacity of working memory because they have no semantic associations and are repeated from trial-to-trial, which minimizes participants' ability to use other memory systems, like episodic visual long-term memory (Cowan, 2001; Lin & Luck, 2012). Mechanisms of persistent activity in cortical circuits: possible neural substrates for working memory. 23, 26–66. Furthermore, comparing the working memory between TBI, MDD, TBI-MDD, and healthy participants discovered that groups with MDD and TBI-MDD performed poorer on the Sternberg working memory task but functional connectivity on the other hand, showed that increased inter-hemispheric working memory gamma connectivity was observed in the TBI and TBI-MDD groups (Bailey et al., 2017). Neurosci. Nevertheless, the adoption of different modalities yielded diverging outcomes and knowledge such as behavioral performances, functional segregation and integration in the brain, white matter integrity, brainwave coherence, and oxy- and deoxyhaemoglobin concentrations that are undeniably useful in application to different fields of study. Nevertheless, inconsistent findings should not be neglected. Investigating the supero-lateral medial forebrain bundle (MFB) that innervates and consequently terminates at the prefrontal cortex, microstructural white matter damage at the said area was indicated in participants with moderate to severe TBI by comparing its integrity with the control group (Owens et al., 2017). Psychol. Radiology 276, 828–835. This feature is especially crucial with regards to the study populations as it differentiates between verbal and visuospatial working memory competence within individuals, which are assumed to be domain-specific as demonstrated by vast studies (such as Nadler and Archibald, 2014; Pham and Hasson, 2014; Nakagawa et al., 2016). doi: 10.1148/radiol.2015142549, Humphreys, M. S., Bain, J. D., and Pike, R. (1989). However, the researchers cautioned the use of the term “activated long-term memory” and opted for “prioritized long-term memory” because these unattended items maintained in working memory seemed to employ a different mechanism than items that were dropped from working memory (Rose et al., 2016). 66, 115–142. 19, 51–57. Curr. Definition: Working Memory is the active maintenance and flexible updating of goal/task relevant information (items, goals, strategies, etc.) (2016). in a form that has limited capacity and resists interference. Typical tasks to test focused attention include the tasks of Flanker, ANT, Simon, Stroop and antisaccade (see Dong & Zhong, 2019 for a comparison of these tasks). (1960). Methylphenidate as a dopamine reuptake inhibitor was found to have modulated the neural activity in the left cerebellum which subsequently correlated with improved working memory performance (Manktelow et al., 2017). Working memory is an important skill in academic learning and performance and higher-order problem-solving/reasoning. 25, 46–59. Neuropsychol. 8, 446–459. Other than that, long-term memory has been unanimously understood as a huge reserve of knowledge about past events, and its existence in a functioning human being is without dispute (Cowan, 2008). doi: 10.1097/HTR.0b013e3181c133e9, Dima, D., Jogia, J., and Frangou, S. (2014). Acute caffeine administration impact on working memory-related brain activation and functional connectivity in the elderly: a BOLD and perfusion MRI study. Anxiety patients show reduced working memory related dlPFC activation during safety and threat. Relationships between time estimation, memory, attention, and processing speed in patients with severe traumatic brain injury. Dir. They then saw instructions for a mathematical operation (e.g., “+3”) in one of the grids and had to update the appropriate number. doi: 10.1007/s002130051047, Reuter-Lorenz, P. A., and Cappell, K. A. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Other than the synaptic theory, the spiking working memory model proposed by Fiebig and Lansner (2017) that borrowed the concept from fast Hebbian plasticity similarly disagreed with persistent neuronal activity and demonstrated that working memory processes were instead manifested in discrete oscillatory bursts. Consistent with the previously described study about emotional processing effects on working memory in older adults, this reported outcome was suggestive of the brain’s failed attempts to suppress pathological amygdalar activation during a verbal working memory task (Stegmayer et al., 2015). Age is not the only factor influencing working memory. Before vaccination and other intervention measures become available, successful containment of an unknown infectious disease critically relies on people’s voluntary compliance with the recommended social-distancing guidelines. This is reasonably accurate for some tasks, such as simply holding on to uncomplicated information (e.g., digits), but it is an overestimate for more complex information and for tasks that require relating bits of information to each other. In contrast, significant correlation between estradiol and other cortical activations in females in the midluteal phase, who had higher estradiol levels, did not result in better performance of the task compared to women in the EF phase or men (Schöning et al., 2007). (1980). Research shows that young children have limited working memory skills, being able to hold only one or two items in memory. Psychol. 40, 603–627. (2017). In particular, in the remaining part of the chapter we argue that (1) meaningfulness, knowledge, and familiarity play an important role in visual working memory and in shaping its capacity; (2) memory for scenes and surfaces is critical in the world, not just memory for objects; (3) even in the case of memory for objects, important regularities between objects often give rise to ensemble information, rather than just individual object representations. Begins with the activation of mood-congruent information in working memory as only a single entity anxiety show! 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