Search results for "Memory span"
showing 10 items of 47 documents
Longitudinal study examining the neurotoxicity of occupational exposure to aluminium-containing welding fumes
2003
The neurotoxicity of occupational exposure to aluminium (Al)-containing welding fumes has been discussed with controversial results. The aim of the longitudinal study was to examine a group of Al welders for significant central nervous changes in comparison with a non-exposed cohort.A group of 98 Al welders (mean age 37 years) in the car-body construction industry, with a median of 6 years of occupational exposure to Al welding fumes, and an education-matched, gender-matched, age-matched control group of 50 car-production workers (mean age 36 years) at the same plant, were included in this longitudinal study. Two cross-sectional studies were done in 1999 and 2001. In the second cross-sectio…
Assessment of frontal lobe functioning in schizophrenia and unipolar major depression.
1993
This study has used neuropsychological tasks – Wisconsin Card Sort (WCST), Trail Making (TMT) A and B, Verbal Fluency, Digit Span – to compare acute and currently off-medication schizophrenics, patients with unipolar nonpsychotic major depression and healthy controls. Both patient groups differed significantly from healthy controls in their neuropsychological performance. Furthermore there was only little (quantitative) difference between schizophrenics and depressed patients in the frontal lobe associated tasks: WCST, TMT and Verbal Fluency. Depressed patients tended to perform worse than schizophrenics on Digit Span, a task hypothesized to involve other than frontal areas of the brain. Al…
Working Memory Alterations Plays an Essential Role in Developing Global Neuropsychological Impairment in Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy
2021
BackgroundNeuropsychological profile of Indian Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) subjects remains unidentified and needs to be evaluated.MethodsA total of 69 DMD and 66 controls were subjected to detailed intelligence and neuropsychological assessment. The factor indexes were derived from various components of Malin’s Intelligence Scale for Indian Children (MISIC) and Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT).ResultsPoor verbal and visual memory profiles were demonstrated by DMDs, which include RAVLT-immediate recall (IR) (p = 0.042), RAVLT-delayed recall (DR) (p = 0.009), Rey–Osterrieth complex figure test (RCFT)-IR (p = 0.001), and RCFT-DR (p = 0.001). RAVLT-memory efficiency index demons…
Effects of the Enriched Sports Activities-Program on Executive Functions in Italian Children.
2020
Physical activity (PA) during childhood plays an important role in brain development. This role is played in both the structural domain, prefrontal cortex area, and in the functional domain, involving the higher cognitive functions, including the executive functions (EF). Working memory (WM), inhibition, and switching as fundamental EF were investigated in an Italian children sample before and after four months of an Enriched Sports Activities-Program (ESA-Program). EFs were assessed at pre-test and post-test using, respectively, the digit span test, the color word Stroop test, and the trail making test derived from Millisecond Software. The Italian sample was composed of 141 children aged …
Delays of retention, processing efficiency, and attentional resources in working memory span development
2004
Working memory span tasks require participants to maintain items in short-term memory while performing some concurrent processing (e.g., reading, counting, or problem solving). The present series of experiments contrasted two models of the development of working memory spans in children. Is this development mainly due to faster completion of the processing component in older children, as Towse and Hitch (1995) suggested, or is it due to resource-related phenomena such as increased processing efficiency and a greater amount of available cognitive resources? Using new computer-paced working memory span tasks that allow a careful control of processing duration, we demonstrate that the cognitiv…
Developmental Increase in Working Memory Span: Resource Sharing or Temporal Decay?
2001
Working memory span tasks require participants to maintain items in short-term memory while performing some concurrent processing (e.g., reading, counting, and problem solving). It has been suggested that the difficulty of these tasks results either from the necessity of sharing a limited resource pool between processing and storage (Case’s cognitive space hypothesis) or from the fact that the memory traces suffer from a temporal decay while the concurrent task is being performed (Towse and Hitch’s memory decay hypothesis). We tested these two hypotheses by comparing children’s performance in tasks in which the processing component always had the same duration but varied in cognitive cost (…
Sports, Executive Functions and Academic Performance: A Comparison between Martial Arts, Team Sports, and Sedentary Children
2021
It is well known that curricular physical activity benefits children’s executive functions and academic performance. Therefore, this study aimed to determine whether there is an influence of extracurricular sports on executive functions and academic performance. However, it is less known which specific types of the sport better enhance executive functions in children
Birth cohort differences in cognitive performance in 75- and 80-year-olds: a comparison of two cohorts over 28 years.
2021
Abstract Objective To evaluate cohort differences in cognitive performance in older men and women born and assessed 28 years apart. Methods Data in this study were drawn from two age-homogeneous cohorts measured in the same laboratory using the same standardized cognitive performance tests. Participants in the first cohort were born in 1910 and 1914 and assessed in 1989–1990 (Evergreen project, n = 500). Participants in the second cohort were born in 1938 or 1939 and 1942 or 1943 and assessed in 2017–2018 (Evergreen II, n = 726). Participants in both cohorts were assessed at age 75 and 80 years and were recruited from the population register. Cognitive performance was measured using the Dig…
Working memory and children’s use of retrieval to solve addition problems
2005
This study tested the hypothesis that children with high working memory capacities solve single-digit additions by direct retrieval of the answers from long-term memory more often than do children with low working memory capacities. Counting and reading letter span tasks were administered to groups of third-grade (mean age=107 months) and fourth-grade (mean age=118 months) children who were also asked to solve 40 single-digit additions. High working memory capacity was associated with more frequent use of retrieval and faster responses in solving additions. The effect of span on the use of retrieval increased with the size of the minimum addend. The relation between working memory measures …
In the here and now: Short term memory predictions are preserved in Alzheimer's disease
2019
According to neuropsychological models of anosognosia, there is a failure to transfer on-line awareness of dysfunction into a more generalised long term belief about memory function in Alzheimer's disease. This failure results in specific metamemory deficits for global predictions: patients overestimate their performance before the task but are able to monitor their memory performance after having experienced the task. However, after a delay, they are still not able to make accurate predictions. As previous work has mainly focused on long-term memory, the present study investigates this issue in short-term and working memory. Using both global and item-by-item metacognitive judgements in a …