An internet study of prospective memory across adulthood

In an Internet study, 73,018 18-79-year-olds were asked to “remember to click the smiley face when it appears”. A smiley face was present/absent at encoding, and participants were told to expect it “at the end of the test”/“later in the test.” In all 4 conditions, it occurred after 20 min of retrospective memory tests. Prospective remembering benefited at all ages from both prior target exposure and temporal uncertainty; moreover, it resembled working memory in its linear decline from young adulthood. The study demonstrates the power of Internet methodology to reveal age-related deficits in a single-trial prospective memory task outside the laboratory

Items on the Left Are Better Remembered

We report evidence of a new phenomenon from three experiments: a leftward bias when people try to remember visually presented information. Experiments 1 and 2 showed lateral leftward biases in memory in a large (total N>60000) sample of participants, with data collected via the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) web site. Experiment 3 replicated the findings of a leftwards bias in short-term memory with a more intensive data collection

Multitasking, working memory and remembering intentions

Multitasking refers to the performance of a range of tasks that have to be completed within a limited time period. it differs from dual task paradigms in that tasks are performed not in parallel, but by interleaving, switching from one to the other. it differs also from task switching paradigms in that the time scale is very much longer, multiple different tasks are involved, and most tasks have a clear end point. Multitasking has been studied extensively with particular sets of experts such as in aviation and in the military, and impairments of multitasking performance have been studied in patients with frontal lobe lesions. Much less is known as to how multitasking is achieved in healthy adults who have not had specific training in the necessary skills. This paper will provide a brief review of research on everyday multitasking, and summarise the results of some recent experiments on simulated everyday tasks chosen to require advance and on-line planning, retrospective memory, prospective memory, and visual, spatial and verbal short-term memory

Assessing the impact of verbal and visuospatial working memory load on eye-gaze cueing

Observers tend to respond more quickly to peripheral stimuli that are being gazed at by a centrally presented face, than to stimuli that are not being gazed at. While this gaze-cueing effect was initially seen as reflexive, there have also been some indications that top-down control processes may be involved. Therefore, the present investigation employed a dual-task paradigm to attempt to disrupt the putative control processes involved in gaze cueing. Two experiments examined the impact of working memory load on gaze cueing. In Experiment 1, participants were required to hold a set of digits in working memory during each gaze trial. In Experiment 2, the gaze task was combined with an auditory task that required the manipulation and maintenance of visuo-spatial information. Gaze cueing effects were observed, but they were not modulated by dual-task load in either experiment. These results are consistent with traditional accounts of gaze cueing as a highly reflexive process

Converging sources of evidence and theory integration in working memory:A commentary on Morey, Rhodes, and Cowan (2019)

Morey et al. (2019) offer a critique of the dominance of the multiple component framework of working memory in the interpretation of patterns of impairment and sparing in individuals with focal brain damage associated with specific impairments of immediate, serial-ordered verbal recall. They argue that the lack of pure cases of verbal short-term memory impairments, that recognition performance is higher than recall in such patients, that digits are remembered better than other verbal material, and that problems with replicability in patient studies undermine this traditional theoretical interpretation of the impairments from which these patients suffer. They further speculate that an alternative theoretical framework for working memory, incorporating embedded processes and perception-action links offers a more plausible account of the data from these patients. This commentary points to a range of errors and misconceptions in the arguments presented, notably that such patients are not as rare as suggested, that their recognition is actually no better than their recall, that digits offer substantial advantages for memory, and that results have been shown to be replicable between and within individuals. It is proposed that attempts to integrate more recent theoretical developments in working memory with those shown previously to be highly successful in accounting for impairments in these patients, and for generating hypotheses and accounts across a wide range of contexts may be a more fruitful approach to advancing understanding of cognition in the healthy and damaged brain