Current Issues in Memory

Memory Research in the Public Interest

Jan Rummel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000363555
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Current Issues in Memory is a series of edited books that reflect the state-of-the-art areas of current and emerging interest in the psychological study of Memory.

For the first time, this book offers a comprehensive new collection which gathers together some of the most influential chapters from the series into one essential volume. Featuring 17 chapters by many of the leading researchers in the field, the volume seeks to illustrate how memory research may be informative to the general public—either because it speaks to questions of personal or societal importance or because it changes traditional ways of thinking within society. Topics range from working memory to false fabrication and autobiographical forgetting, showcasing the breadth of memory research in the public sphere.

With an introduction and conclusion by Professor Jan Rummel, this is the ideal companion for any student or practitioner looking for an insightful overview of the most researched topics in the field.

Part I

Memory representations: From (visual) perception to stored information

1

The organization of visuospatial working memory

Evidence from the study of developmental disorders^*

Cesare Cornoldi and Irene C. Mammarella

Visuospatial abilities and their relation to visuospatial working memory

Visuospatial ability is not a unitary process, but instead can be broken down into various distinct types. The differentiation and classification of these types has been influenced by the findings from various instruments chosen to examine visuospatial ability.

Factor-analytic studies of visuospatial ability tasks point to the existence of distinct spatial abilities. For example, some authors (Hegarty & Waller, 2004; McGee, 1979) have distinguished between main aspects, i.e., visualization and orientation. Visualization refers to the ability to mentally rotate and manipulate objects, while orientation refers to the ability to retain spatial orientation with respect to oneself. Linn and Peterson (1985) and Voyer, Voyer, and Bryden (1995) distinguished three categories of spatial ability based on the various different processes required to solve problems representing each ability. These categories were:

1spatial perception (ability to determine spatial relationships with respect to one’s own orientation);

2mental rotation (ability to mentally rotate a two- or three-dimensional figure rapidly and accurately); and

3spatial visualization (ability to manipulate spatially presented information in complex ways).

Examples of tests are: for (1) the water level test (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958); for (2) the Mental Rotation Test (Vandenberg & Kruse, 1978); and for (3) the Differential Aptitude Test spatial relations subtest. Carpenter and Just (1986) distinguished only two categories of spatial ability:

1spatial orientation (ability to identify spatial configurations from a different perspective);

2spatial manipulation (ability to mentally restructure a two- or three-dimensional object).

Cornoldi and Vecchi (2003, p. 16) instead presented a broader classification, distinguishing between ten different groups of visuospatial abilities, which included visuospatial working memory. Finally, Bunton and Fogarty (2003) examined the relationship between visual imagery and spatial abilities using a confirmatory factor analysis. Their findings supported the notion that the abilities targeted by the tasks referred to above can be classified along a continuum. The self-report imagery questionnaires are located on the left-hand side of the continuum, while experimental tasks examining spatial-imagery and visuospatial memory can be located at the centre. On the right of the continuum they placed the creative imagery tasks of Finke, Pinker, and Farah (1989), and—at the far end—spatial intelligence tests (primary mental abilities, Thurstone & Thurstone, 1965, and Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices, Raven, 1965). The main thrust of Bunton and Fogarty (2003) has therefore been to offer a description of the relationships between visual imagery, visuospatial memory, and spatial abilities, also showing their proximity.

In summary, psychometrical research has clearly shown that visuospatial ability is not a homogeneous concept, but consists of subcomponents that are quite distinct, albeit closely related. Nevertheless, despite all the attempts at a suitable classification of the spatial subfactors, the correct operationalization of these factors and their relationships remain unclear. For example, there is evidence to suggest that there is indeed a relationship between working memory capacity and visuospatial ability (Just & Carpenter, 1985). Solving a mental rotation or spatial visualization task requires the ability to maintain an active representation of all the parts and their interrelations, while simultaneously rotating and manipulating the image mentally. This elaboration, involving both storage (holding the constituent parts in memory) and the concurrent processing of spatial representations (the rotation component), fits closely with current conceptions of working memory (Miyake & Shah, 1999). In studies of visuospatial abilities and visuospatial working memory individual differences consequently overlap to some extent.

The individual differences approach in the study of working memory

The individual differences approach—investigating the role of individual differences such as cognitive abilities and personality in human behaviour—can be useful in explaining human differences and finding critical psychological variables which, making individuals different, appear to be central for psychological functioning.

Knowledge of working memory has benefited greatly from studies involving both the consideration of variability within typical populations, and the examination of specific impairments in clinical populations and individual cases (Cornoldi & Vecchi, 2003). One development in the field has concerned the attentional control of irrelevant information. For example, Engle and colleagues have repeatedly explored the role of individual differences in working memory capacity on verbal fluency under various secondary load conditions (Rosen & Engle, 1997), the relationship between working memory capacity and attentional control (Kane, Bleckley, Conway, & Engle, 2001), individual differences in switching the focus of attention in working memory, and so on (see Unsworth & Engle, 2007 for a review). In general, this work showed that individual differences in working memory, as measured by complex span tasks in which to-be-remembered items are interspersed with some form of distracting activity, arise from differences in attentional control affecting the ability to maintain and retrieve information from memory. In particular, in situations where new and novel information needs to be maintained to generate the correct response, low-working memory capacity individuals are more likely than their working memory counterparts to have their attention distracted and thus lose access to the task goal.

However, to date, experiments have mostly been conducted within the verbal domain (Unsworth & Engle, 2006) rather than the visuospatial (Mammarella & Cornoldi, 2005a; Cornoldi & Mammarella, 2006). In a recent study, Lecerf and Roulin (2009) showed that low-visuospatial working memory participants had deficits in distractor inhibition and that their memory representations were more degraded. Specifically, high-visuospatial working memory participants performed better than low-visuospatial working memory participants, while these latter demonstrated more intrusions of irrelevant information than their high-span counterparts. Thus, low-span participants were less able to suppress items that had to be forgotten. Moreover, inhibitory control was negatively correlated to visuospatial working memory capacity. Similarly, Cornoldi, Bassani, Berto, and Mammarella (2007) demonstrated that elderly individuals performed less well than younger individuals and that errors in visuospatial working memory tasks depend, at least partially, on difficulties in avoiding already activated information. As mentioned, the individual differences approach has been applied to the study of working memory, enabling analysis of various populations (i.e., elderly, low spatial abilities, low working-memory span individuals, learning disabled children, etc.), at the same time broadening knowledge on the architecture of working memory components (but see also Logie, in Spatial Working Memory, chapter 2).

Indeed, the study of individual differences has been critical to the differentiation of cognitive abilities, including working memory components.

In the field of memory, the original Baddeley and Hitch (1974) model, with its evolution (Baddeley, 2000), represented an innovative approach to the study of how the temporary memory system functions, and still today remains a relevant theoretical framework. According to this model, working memory is composed of two subsidiary domain-specific components, namely a phonological loop and a visuospatial sketchpad, which are supervised by an amodal unit, the central executive. The phonological loop temporarily stores and manipulates verbalizable items, while the visuospatial sketchpad is responsible for the maintenance and processing of visual (e.g., colour, shape, texture) and spatial (e.g., position of an object in space) information, as well as mental imagery activities. Instead, the central executive component is involved in the regulatory control of the tasks carried out by the two slave systems. Moreover, it serves to focus or switch attention and recover mental representations from long-term memory (Baddeley & Logie, 1999).

Organization of the working memory components within the continuity model

Over the last 20 years, alternative approaches to working memory have been developed that emphasize the articulated architecture of the system and its limits in the amount of information that can be stored and processed. It was on this basis that Cornoldi and Vecchi (2003) put forward a formulation of the working memory model giving a new account of the organization of working memory proposed by the classical Baddeley (1986) model. According to this novel concept, “working memory system and its subsystems can be viewed as representatives of well-characterised groups of processes along continuous dimensions rather than as discrete entities” (Cornoldi & Vecchi, 2003, p. 50). Working memory functions are not rigidly separated, but instead thought of as being linked in a continuous fashion along horizontal and vertical dimensions. In other words, the continuity model is characterized by two fundamental dimensions based on continuum relations: the horizontal continuum, related to the various types of material involved (e.g., verbal, visual, spatial, haptic); and the vertical continuum, related to the types of process, requiring some degree of active elaboration and manipulation of information (see Figure 1.1). Each process is thus defined on the basis of two dimensions (vertical and horizontal), while distance between positions represents the degree of independence between tasks. An assumption of this type leads to the argument that working memory tasks are defined in terms of their position along both continua. At a lower level of the vertical continuum, expressing the degree of controlled activity involved, there are passive memory tasks, or simple span tasks, usually based on rote rehearsal of items (e.g., forward digit span) that are strictly related to the nature of the stimuli to be retained. In contrast, active memory tasks, or complex span tasks (Engle, Kane, & Tuholski, 1999), require both maintenance and concurrent processing of information, such as order change (e.g., backwards digit span) or selection and inhibition of irrelevant or no-longer-relevant information (e.g., listening span task). According to Cornoldi and Vecchi (2003), complex span tasks may vary in the degree of controlled activity involved and maintain domain-specific characteristics, despite the higher involvement of control processes than that for simple span tasks; thus, for example, it is possible to distinguish between verbal and spatial active tasks.

Figure 1.1The continuity model proposed by Cornoldi and Vecchi (2003)

Although working memory tasks can vary in degree of controlled activity involved and thus occupy different positions on the vertical continuum, they can broadly be located between passive tasks (lowest down in the continuum) and active tasks (highest up). As examples, passive verbal memory tasks include the forward digit span (see also Engle et al., 1999). Passive spatial tasks include the forward Corsi Blocks Test (CBT; Milner, 1971), in which participants have to remember and reproduce the sequence in the same order as that given by the experimenter; another is the Visual Pattern Test (VPT; Della Sala, Gray, Baddeley, & Wilson, 1997) where participants have to memorize patterns of filled cells in matrices of varying sizes, and then fill in cells on a blank matrix to reproduce the original pattern.

An example of an active verbal task is the Reading Span Task (RST) proposed by Daneman and Carpenter (1980). In the commonest version of this task, participants have to read a growing series of sentences (from two to six), deciding whether they are true, and recalling the last word of each sentence. To do so participants have to perform two tasks almost simultaneously, i.e., processing the meaning of each sentence to decide whether it is true or false, and maintaining the last word of each sentence. To be successful in the memory tasks, it has been shown that participants have to be able to keep the last word active while handling interfering information (i.e., the words within sentences)—see for example De Beni, Palladino, Pazzaglia, & Cornoldi, (1998). One active spa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Memory representations: From (visual) perception to stored information
• Part II Memory adaptations: Forgetting the past, remembering the future
• Part III Memory limitations: False memories
• Part IV Memory augmentations: How can memory capacities be improved?
• Index