Content-specificity in verbal recall: a randomized controlled study.

In this controlled experiment we examined whether there are content effects in verbal short-term memory and working memory for verbal stimuli. Thirty-seven participants completed forward and backward digit and letter recall tasks, which were constructed to control for distance effects between stimuli. A maximum-likelihood mixed-effects logistic regression revealed main effects of direction of recall (forward vs backward) and content (digits vs letters). There was an interaction between type of recall and content, in which the recall of digits was superior to the recall of letters in verbal short-term memory but not in verbal working memory. These results demonstrate that the recall of information from verbal short-term memory is content-specific, whilst the recall of information from verbal working memory is content-general

Illiterate to literate: Behavioural and cerebral changes induced by reading acquisition.

The acquisition of literacy transforms the human brain. By reviewing studies of illiterate subjects, we propose specific hypotheses concerning the core brain systems whose previous function is partially reoriented or “recycled” when learning to read. Literacy acquisition improves early visual processing and reorganizes the ventral occipito-temporal pathway: a left region increases its response to written characters, while responses to faces shift towards the right hemisphere. Literacy also modifies phonological coding and strengthens the functional and anatomic link between phonemic and graphemic representations. Literacy acquisition therefore provides a remarkable example of how the brain reorganizes to accommodate a novel cultural skill.SCOPUS: re.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe