A new index of semantic short-term memory: Development and validation of the conceptual span task in Spanish

Mounting evidence from both cognitive and neuropsychological research points to the importance of conceptual and lexical-semantic contributors to short-term memory performance. Nonetheless, a standardized and well-controlled measure to assess semantic short-term memory was only recently developed for English-speakers, and no parallel measure exists for Spanish-speakers. In the conceptual replication and extension reported here, we develop and validate a Spanish adaptation of the Conceptual Span task as a tool to measure the semantic component of short-term memory. Two versions of the task were validated, the Clustered and the Non-Clustered Conceptual Span task, both in separate samples of 64 and 105 Spanish-speaking university students. We found that both versions of the Conceptual Span task correlate well with another widely used standardized measure of working memory capacity, the Reading Span task. The two versions also correlated, as expected, with discrimination of linguistic congruency as assessed by a semantic anomaly judgment task. Clustered Conceptual Span remained a significant predictor of Reading Span when controlling for several additional cognitive variables, including fluid reasoning, text comprehension, verbal fluency, ideational fluency, and speed of processing. Our results present evidence that the Spanish adaptation of both versions of the Conceptual Span task can yield reliable estimates of the active maintenance of semantic representations in verbal working memory-an under-investigated ability that is involved in diverse domains such as episodic memory retrieval, language processing, and comprehension. Thus, the Conceptual Span task validated here can be employed to predict individual variation in semantic short-term memory capacity in a broad range of research domains

The cognitive neurosciences of constructive memory.

ABSTRACT Numerous empirical and theoretical observations point to the constructive nature of human memory. This paper reviews contemporary research pertaining to two major types of memory distortions that illustrate such constructive processes: (a) false recognition and (b) intrusions and confabulations. A general integrative framework that outlines the types of problems that the human memory system must solve in order to produce mainly accurate representations of past experience is first described. This constructive memory framework (CMF) emphasizes processes that operate at encoding (initially binding distributed features of an episode together as a coherent trace; ensuring sufficient pattern separation of similar episodes) and also at retrieval (formation of a sufficiently focused retrieval description with which to query memory; postretrieval monitoring and verification). The framework is applied to findings from four different areas of research: cognitive studies of young adults, neuropsychological investigations of brain-damaged patients, neuroimaging studies, and studies of cognitive aging. CONTENT

Late onset of anterior prefrontal activity during true and false recognition: an eventrelated fMRI study

Previous studies using PET and fMRI to examine memory retrieval have been limited by the requirement to test different types of items in separate blocks and to average data across items and response types within blocks. We used recently developed procedures for analyzing event-related mixed trial data from fMRI experiments to compare brain activity during true recognition of previously studied words and false recognition of semantic associates. A previous PET study using blocked testing procedures reported similarities and differences in rCBF patterns associated with true and false recognition (Schacter et al., 1996a). We examined brain activity during blocked testing of studied words and nonstudied semantic associates (similar to PET), and also during event-related mixed trials, where studied words and nonstudied semantic associates are intermixed. Six subjects initially heard lists of semantically related words and were later tested for old/new recognition with studied words and nonstudied semantic associates, either in separate blocks or intermixed randomly for the event-related analysis. Compared to a fixation control condition, a variety of regions previously reported in the PET study showed significant activation for both true and false recognition, including anterior prefrontal, frontal opercular, medial parietal, and visual cortex extending into hippocampal/ parahippocampal regions. Differences across trial types were not clearly present. Event-related analyses of time course data show a relatively late onset and sustained duration for anterior prefrontal signal changes compared to signal changes in other activated regions. Further study is needed to resolve whether this late onset originates from variance in hemodynamic response properties or is attributable to delayed neural activity. The delayed onset is consistent with the idea that anterior prefrontal regions participate in postretrieval monitoring processes. 1997 Academic Pres

Capturing, Clarifying, and Consolidating the Curiosity-Creativity Connection (Study 2, Preregistered)

Study aims: This study is a preregistered follow-up and conceptual replication of an earlier experiment (referred to here as Study 1). The primary aim of the current study is to examine the association between curiosity and creativity when: (a) both curiosity and creativity are measured using behaviorally observed outcomes (rather than only self-report), and (b) both curiosity and creativity are assessed using behavioral measures that assess two core aspects of each construct. For curiosity the two core aspects involve: (i) internally generated exploration and identification of what an individual does not know or desires to know, here operationally assessed through the formulation and posing of questions ("question asking") regarding experimentally presented factual information; (ii) externally supported exploratory information seeking, here operationally assessed through an individual's choosing to look at the answers to visually provided questions ("information foraging"). For creativity the two core aspects involve: (i) divergent thinking, the generation of multiple, varied, and original ideas in response to an open-ended problem, for which a large number of possible responses are acceptable and may be deemed correct; (ii) convergent thinking, the generation of the single best (or correct) answer to a clearly defined problem or question

Charting the contributions of cognitive flexibility to creativity: Self-guided transitions as a process-based index of creativity-related adaptivity.

Creativity is pivotal to solving complex problems of many kinds, yet how cognitive flexibility dynamically supports creative processes is largely unexplored. Despite being a crucial multi-faceted contributor in creative thinking, cognitive flexibility, as typically assessed, does not fully capture how people adaptively shift between varying or persisting in their current problem-solving efforts. To fill this theoretical and methodological gap, we introduce a new operationalization of cognitive flexibility: the process-based Self-Guided Transition (SGT) measures, which assess when participants autonomously choose to continue working on one of two concurrently presented items (dwell length) and how often they choose to switch between the two items (shift count). We examine how these measures correlate with three diverse creativity tasks, and with creative performance on a more complex "garden design" task. Analyses of the relations between these new cognitive flexibility measures in 66 young adults revealed that SGT dwell length positively correlated with creative performance across several tasks. The SGT shift count positively correlated with within-task performance for a two-item choice task tapping divergent thinking (Alternative Uses Task) but not for a two-item choice task calling on convergent thinking (Anagram task). Multiple regression analyses revealed that, taken together, both the shift count and dwell length measures from the Alternative Uses Task explained a significant proportion of variance in measures of fluency, and originality, on a composite measure of the three independently-assessed creative tasks. Relations of SGTs to the Garden Design task were weaker, though shift count on the Alternative Uses Task was predictive of a composite measure of overall Garden Design quality. Taken together, these results highlight the promise of our new process-based measures to better chart the dynamically flexible processes supporting creative thinking and action

The multifaceted role of self-generated question asking in curiosity-driven learning

Curiosity motivates the search for missing information, driving learning, scientific discovery, and innovation. Yet identifying that there is a gap in one’s knowledge is itself a critical step, and may demand that one formulate a question to precisely express what is missing. Our work captures the integral role of self-generated questions during the acquisition of new information, which we refer to as active-curiosity-driven learning. We tested active-curiosity-driven learning using our “Curiosity Question & Answer Task” paradigm, where participants (N=135) were asked to generate questions in response to novel, incomplete factual statements and provided the opportunity to forage for answers. We also introduce new measures of question quality that express how well questions capture stimulus and foraging information. We hypothesized that active question asking should influence behavior across the stages of our task by increasing the probability that participants express curiosity, forage for answers, and remember what they had thereby discovered. We found that individuals who asked a high number of quality questions experienced elevated curiosity, were more likely to pursue missing information that was semantically related to their questions, and more likely to retain the information on a later cued recall test. Additional analyses revealed that curiosity played a predominant role in motivating participants to forage for missing information, and that both curiosity and satisfaction with the acquired information boosted memory recall. Overall our results suggest that asking questions enhances the value of missing information, with important implications for learning and discovery of all forms

If Not Now, Where? Time and Space Equivalency in Strategy Games

Spatiotemporal reasoning is a fundamental contributor to effective problem solving. In an effort to design better problem-solving agents, we examined and evaluated the strategies that humans use to solve Tower Defense puzzles, a complex and popular class of real-time strategy games. A consistent and unexpected finding was that humans frequently treated time and space as equivalent. Players stated temporal goals but solved spatial problems. An analysis of human data and computer simulations showed that re-representing temporal problems as spatial problems was beneficial, but treating the two separately can lead to higher scores. The work presented here holds several possibilities for level designers and others who design and analyze maps and spatial arrangements for domains requiring strategic reasoning