4,517 research outputs found
Evidence for two attentional components in visual working memory
How does executive attentional control contribute to memory for sequences of visual objects, and what does this reveal about storage and processing in working memory? Three experiments examined the impact of a concurrent executive load (backward counting) on memory for sequences of individually presented visual objects. Experiments 1 and 2 found disruptive concurrent load effects of equivalent magnitude on memory for shapes, colors, and colored shape conjunctions (as measured by single-probe recognition). Crucially, these effects were only present for items 1 and 2 in a 3-item sequence; the final item was always impervious to this disruption. This pattern of findings was precisely replicated in Experiment 3 using a cued verbal recall measure of shape-color binding, with error analysis providing additional insights concerning attention-related loss of early-sequence items. These findings indicate an important role for executive processes in maintaining representations of earlier encountered stimuli in an active form alongside privileged storage of the most recent stimulus
Exploring the sentence advantage in working memory: Insights from serial recall and recognition
Immediate serial recall of sentences has been shown to be superior to that of unrelated words. This study was designed to further explore how this effect might emerge in recall and to establish whether it also extends to serial recognition, a different form of response task that has relatively reduced output requirements. Using auditory or visual presentation
of sequences, we found a substantial advantage for sentences over lists in serial recall, an effect shown on measures of recall accuracy, order, intrusion, and omission errors and reflected in transposition gradients. In contrast however, recognition memory based on a standard change detection paradigm gave only weak and inconsistent evidence for a sentence superiority effect. However, when a more sensitive staircase procedure imported from psychophysics was used, a clear sentence advantage was found although the effect sizes were smaller than those observed in serial recall. These findings suggest that sentence recall benefits from automatic processes that utilise long-term knowledge across encoding, storage, and retrieval
Unimodal and crossmodal working memory binding is not differentially affected by age or Alzheimer’s disease
Working Memory Binding (WMB) entails the integration of multiple sources of information to form and temporarily store unique representations. Information can be processed through either one (i.e., Unimodal WMB) or separate sensory modalities (i.e., Crossmodal WMB). Objective: In this study, we investigated whether Crossmodal WMB is differentially affected by normal or pathological aging compared to Unimodal WMB. Method: Experiment 1: 26 older and 26 younger adults recalled the target feature matching the test probe to complete a previously displayed color-shape binding (visually presented in the Unimodal condition; auditorily and visually presented in the Crossmodal condition). Experiment 2: 35 older and 35 younger adults undertook the same paradigm while carrying out articulatory suppression to limit verbal recoding. Experiment 3: 24 Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients and two groups of 24 healthy matched controls (tested respectively with the same and an increased memory load compared to the patients) were recruited to perform a similar task. Results: Results show no age-related additional cost in Crossmodal WMB in respect to Unimodal WMB. AD patients had poor attainment in both WMB tasks regardless of specific binding condition. Conclusion: These findings provide evidence identifying WMB per se to be impaired in AD, regardless of the type of to-be-bound material. This supports the view that WMB is a suitable cognitive marker for AD
Executive and perceptual attention play different roles in visual working memory: Evidence from suffix and strategy effects
Four experiments studied the interfering effects of a to-be-ignored ‘stimulus suffix’ on cued recall of feature bindings for a series of objects. When each object was given equal weight (Experiment 1) or rewards favored recent items (Experiments 2 and 4), a recency effect emerged that was selectively reduced by a suffix. The reduction was greater for a ‘plausible’ suffix with features drawn from the same set as the memory items, in which case a feature of the suffix was frequently recalled as an intrusion error. Changing pay-offs to reward recall of early items led to a primacy effect alongside recency (Experiments 3 and 4). Primacy, like recency, was reduced by a suffix and the reduction was greater for a suffix with plausible features, such features often being recalled as intrusion errors. Experiment 4 revealed a trade-off such that increased primacy came at the cost of a reduction in recency. These observations show that priority instructions and recency combine to determine a limited number of items that are the most accessible for immediate recall and yet at the same time the most vulnerable to interference. We interpret this outcome in terms of a labile, limited capacity ‘privileged state’ controlled by both central executive processes and perceptual attention. We suggest further that this privileged state can be usefully interpreted as the focus of attention in the episodic buffer
Light scattering from three-level systems: The T-matrix of a point-dipole with gain
We present an extension of the T-matrix approach to scattering of light by a
three-level system, using a description based on a Master equation. More
particularly, we apply our formalism to calculate the T-matrix of a pumped
three-level atom, providing an exact and analytical expression describing the
influence of a pump on the light scattering properties of an atomic three-level
system
The Leeway of Shipping Containers at Different Immersion Levels
The leeway of 20-foot containers in typical distress conditions is
established through field experiments in a Norwegian fjord and in open-ocean
conditions off the coast of France with wind speed ranging from calm to 14 m/s.
The experimental setup is described in detail and certain recommendations given
for experiments on objects of this size. The results are compared with the
leeway of a scaled-down container before the full set of measured leeway
characteristics are compared with a semi-analytical model of immersed
containers. Our results are broadly consistent with the semi-analytical model,
but the model is found to be sensitive to choice of drag coefficient and makes
no estimate of the cross-wind leeway of containers. We extend the results from
the semi-analytical immersion model by extrapolating the observed leeway
divergence and estimates of the experimental uncertainty to various realistic
immersion levels. The sensitivity of these leeway estimates at different
immersion levels are tested using a stochastic trajectory model. Search areas
are found to be sensitive to the exact immersion levels, the choice of drag
coefficient and somewhat less sensitive to the inclusion of leeway divergence.
We further compare the search areas thus found with a range of trajectories
estimated using the semi-analytical model with only perturbations to the
immersion level. We find that the search areas calculated without estimates of
crosswind leeway and its uncertainty will grossly underestimate the rate of
expansion of the search areas. We recommend that stochastic trajectory models
of container drift should account for these uncertainties by generating search
areas for different immersion levels and with the uncertainties in crosswind
and downwind leeway reported from our field experiments.Comment: 25 pages, 11 figures and 5 tables; Ocean Dynamics, Special Issue on
Advances in Search and Rescue at Sea (2012
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