Effects of Education: Short- term Memory, Working Memory, and Fluid Intelligence in Young Children

Short- term memory, working memory, and fluid intelligence are cognitive constructs shown to predict academic and professional success. As veritable cornerstones of cognitive functioning, it is critical to understand how these mechanisms relate to each other and how these relationships develop over time. This research reviews behavioral and neural findings concerning the dissociation of short- term memory and working memory, as well as the relationship between working memory and fluid intelligence to provide a better understanding of these constructs. It also uses latent growth curve modeling to examine three possible hypotheses for how the introduction of formal education mediates the interactions between these cognitive infrastructures. By performing relatively complex analysis on data obtained from a Luxembourgish population, this study provides support for the dissociation of short- term and working memory in elementary- aged children, demonstrates the close relationship between working memory and fluid intelligence, and provides an argument for an independent influences hypothesis of cognitive development. This hypothesis suggests that education improves individuals’ cognitive performance at similar rates. In other words, those who start out ahead remain in front and those that begin behind never catch up. This provides important implications for educational policy

Forgetting My Memories by Listening to Yours: The Impact of Perspective-Takingon Socially-Triggered Context-Based Prediction Error

The mind is a prediction machine. In most situations in which it finds itself, it has expectations as to what mighthappen. But when people’s expectations are invalidated by experience, the memories that gave rise to these expectations aresuppressed. The present research explores the effect of these prediction errors on listener’s memories during social interaction.We reasoned that listening to a speaker recounting experiences similar to one’s own would trigger prediction errors on the part ofthe listener that would result in the suppression of his/her memories. Study 1 offers evidence for the effect of socially triggeredcontext based prediction errors on listener’s mnemonic representations. Study 2 replicates these findings and shows that thiseffect is sensitive to a perspective-taking manipulation. Taken together, these findings provide evidence for a yet unrecognizedphenomenon by which our conversations shape the memories that we come to hold

Mnemonic convergence in social networks: The emergent properties of cognition at a collective level

The development of shared memories, beliefs, and norms is a fundamental characteristic of human communities. These emergent outcomes are thought to occur owing to a dynamic system of information sharing and memory updating, which fundamentally depends on communication. Here we report results on the formation of collective memories in laboratory-created communities. We manipulated conversational network structure in a series of real-time, computer-mediated interactions in fourteen 10-member communities. The results show that mnemonic convergence, measured as the degree of overlap among community members’ memories, is influenced by both individual-level information-processing phenomena and by the conversational social network structure created during conversational recall. By studying laboratory-created social networks, we show how large-scale social phenomena (i.e., collective memory) can emerge out of microlevel local dynamics (i.e., mnemonic reinforcement and suppression effects). The social-interactionist approach proposed herein points to optimal strategies for spreading information in social networks and provides a framework for measuring and forging collective memories in communities of individuals

Mnemonic convergence in social networks: The emergent properties of cognition at a collective level

The development of shared memories, beliefs, and norms is a fundamental characteristic of human communities. These emergent outcomes are thought to occur owing to a dynamic system of information sharing and memory updating, which fundamentally depends on communication. Here we report results on the formation of collective memories in laboratory-created communities. We manipulated conversational network structure in a series of real-time, computer-mediated interactions in fourteen 10-member communities. The results show that mnemonic convergence, measured as the degree of overlap among community members’ memories, is influenced by both individual-level information-processing phenomena and by the conversational social network structure created during conversational recall. By studying laboratory-created social networks, we show how large-scale social phenomena (i.e., collective memory) can emerge out of microlevel local dynamics (i.e., mnemonic reinforcement and suppression effects). The social-interactionist approach proposed herein points to optimal strategies for spreading information in social networks and provides a framework for measuring and forging collective memories in communities of individuals