Search results for "working memory"
showing 10 items of 315 documents
Dynamics of brain activity underlying working memory for music in a naturalistic condition
2014
We aimed at determining the functional neuroanatomy of working memory (WM) recognition of musical motifs that occurs while listening to music by adopting a non-standard procedure. Western tonal music provides naturally occurring repetition and variation of motifs. These serve as WM triggers, thus allowing us to study the phenomenon of motif tracking within real music. Adopting a modern tango as stimulus, a behavioural test helped to identify the stimulus motifs and build a time-course regressor of WM neural responses. This regressor was then correlated with the participants' (musicians') functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signal obtained during a continuous listening condition. In…
Frontal–posterior theta oscillations reflect memory retrieval during sentence comprehension
2015
Abstract Successful working-memory retrieval requires that items be retained as distinct units. At the neural level, it has been shown that theta-band oscillatory power increases with the number of to-be-distinguished items during working-memory retrieval. Here we hypothesized that during sentence comprehension, verbal-working-memory retrieval demands lead to increased theta power over frontal cortex, supposedly supporting the distinction amongst stored items during verbal-working-memory retrieval. Also, synchronicity may increase between the frontal cortex and the posterior cortex, with the latter supposedly supporting item retention. We operationalized retrieval by using pronouns, which r…
Metabolic connectivity as index of verbal working memory
2015
Positron emission tomography (PET) data are commonly analyzed in terms of regional intensity, while covariant information is not taken into account. Here, we searched for network correlates of healthy cognitive function in resting state PET data. PET with [18F]-fluorodeoxyglucose and a test of verbal working memory (WM) were administered to 35 young healthy adults. Metabolic connectivity was modeled at a group level using sparse inverse covariance estimation. Among 13 WM-relevant Brodmann areas (BAs), 6 appeared to be robustly connected. Connectivity within this network was significantly stronger in subjects with above-median WM performance. In respect to regional intensity, i.e., metaboli…
Neural dynamics of learning sound-action associations.
2008
A motor component is pre-requisite to any communicative act as one must inherently move to communicate. To learn to make a communicative act, the brain must be able to dynamically associate arbitrary percepts to the neural substrate underlying the pre-requisite motor activity. We aimed to investigate whether brain regions involved in complex gestures (ventral pre-motor cortex, Brodmann Area 44) were involved in mediating association between novel abstract auditory stimuli and novel gestural movements. In a functional resonance imaging (fMRI) study we asked participants to learn associations between previously unrelated novel sounds and meaningless gestures inside the scanner. We use functio…
Effects of a Psychosocial Intervention on the Executive Functioning in Children With ADHD
2011
The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of an intensive psychosocial intervention on the executive functioning (EF) in children with ADHD. The treatment was carried out in a coordinated manner over a period of 10 weeks with 27 children with ADHD aged 7 to 10, their parents, and their teachers. A battery of neuropsychological tasks was applied to evaluate attention, interference control, verbal and visuospatial working memory, planning ability, and flexibility. The comparative analysis of the treated group of ADHD children and an untreated ADHD group showed significant differences that were especially important in visuospatial memory and planning in favor of the treated childre…
Visuospatial deficits in schizophrenia: central executive and memory subsystems impairments
2002
Object and spatial visual working memory are impaired in schizophrenic patients. It is not clear if the impairments reside in each memory subsystem alone or also in the central executive component that coordinates these processes. In order to elucidate which memory component is impaired, we developed a paradigm with single spatial and object working memory tasks and dual ones with two different delays (5 and 30 s). Fifteen schizophrenic patients and 14 control subjects performed these tests. Schizophrenic patients had a poorer performance compared to normal controls in all tasks and in all time delays. Both schizophrenics and controls performed significantly worse in the object task than in…
Multitasking in aging: ERP correlates of dual-task costs in young versus low, intermediate, and high performing older adults
2018
Abstract With large inter-individual variability, older adults show a decline in cognitive performance in dual-task situations. Differences in attentional processes, working memory, response selection, and general speed of information processing have been discussed as potential sources of this decline and its between-subject variability. In comparison to young subjects (n = 36, mean age: 25 years), we analyzed the performance of a large group of healthy elderly subjects (n = 138, mean age: 70 years) in a conflicting dual-task situation (PRP paradigm). Based on their dual-task costs (DTCs), the older participants were clustered in three groups of high, medium, and low performing elderly. DTC…
Maternal history of reading difficulty is associated with reduced language-related gray matter in beginning readers.
2012
Family history and poor preliteracy skills (referred to here as familial and behavioral risk, respectively) are critical predictors of developmental dyslexia. This study systematically investigated the independent contribution of familial and behavioral risks on brain structures, which had not been explored in past studies. We also examined the differential effects of maternal versus paternal history on brain morphometry, and familial risk dimensionally versus categorically, which were also novel aspects of the study. We assessed 51 children (5 to 6 years of age) with varying degrees of familial and behavioral risks for developmental dyslexia and examined associations with brain morphometry…
Influence of articulation rate on two memory tasks in young and older adults.
2008
This study investigated the relation between phonological loop functioning and age. Phonological loop is a time-based subsystem of the Working Memory Model of Baddeley and Wilson, which uses rehearsal of information as an active process to avoid phonological decay. Performance differences were examined between young and older adults in two speech-based memory tasks, such as the immediate serial recall of words and the Digit Ordering Task. Analysis showed that performance on both tasks was lower for the older group. Articulation rate was also measured to test the hypothesis that the impairment of some cognitive functions in adults can be associated to their slowness or the greater time need…
Individual differences in working memory capacity are unrelated to the magnitudes of retrocue benefits
2021
AbstractPrevious studies have associated visual working memory (VWM) capacity with the use of internal attention. Retrocues, which direct internal attention to a particular object or feature dimension, can improve VWM performance (i.e., retrocue benefit, RCB). However, so far, no study has investigated the relationship between VWM capacity and the magnitudes of RCBs obtained from object-based and dimension-based retrocues. The present study explored individual differences in the magnitudes of object- and dimension-based RCBs and their relationships with VWM capacity. Participants completed a VWM capacity measurement, an object-based cue task, and a dimension-based cue task. We confirmed tha…