Four experiments explored the task span procedure: Subjects received lists of 1-10 task names to remember and then lists of 1-10 stimuli on which to perform the tasks. Task span is the number of tasks performed in order perfectly. Experiment 1 compared the task span with the traditional memory span in 6 practiced subjects and found little…

A visual short-term memory task was more strongly disrupted by visual than spatial interference, and a spatial memory task was simultaneously more strongly disrupted by spatial than visual interference. This double dissociation supports a fractionation of visuospatial short-term memory into separate visual and spatial components. In 6 experiments,…

Gerstadt, Hong, and Diamond (1994) investigated the development of inhibitory control in children aged 3 1/2 - 7 years using the day-night task. In two studies we build on Gerstadt et al.'s findings with a measure of inhibitory control that can be used throughout childhood. In Study 1 (twenty-four 3 1/2-year-olds and sixteen 5-year-olds) we…

To investigate the stability of trace reactivation in healthy older adults, 22 older volunteers with no significant neurological history participated in a cross-modal priming task. Whilst both object relative center embedded (ORC) and object relative right branching (ORR) sentences were employed, working memory load was reduced by limiting the…

Down syndrome is associated with severe deficits in language and verbal short-term memory, but the causal relationship between these deficits is unclear. The current study therefore investigated the influence of language abilities on verbal short-term memory performance in Down syndrome. Twenty-one individuals with Down syndrome and 29 younger…

This study investigated the effect of individual differences in state anxiety on tasks tapping the central executive, phonological, and visuo-spatial components of working memory (WM). It was designed to test Eysenck and Calvo's processing efficiency theory (PET) which suggests that the phonological and executive components of WM may be important…

Using the Luck and Vogel change detection paradigm, we sought to investigate the capacity of visual working memory in 5-, 7-, and 10-year-olds. We found that performance on the task improved significantly with age and also obtained evidence that the capacity of visual working memory approximately doubles between 5 and 10 years of age, where it…

Background: The study is concerned with the cognitive abilities of children with specific language impairment (SLI). Previous research has indicated that children with SLI demonstrate difficulties with certain cognitive tasks despite normal non-verbal IQ scores. It has been suggested that a general processing limitation might account for the…

Four experiments investigated the impact of the lexical status of memory and processing stimuli on complex memory performance, with the aim of exploring mechanisms of interference in working memory. In a complex memory task, participants recalled words or nonwords while either monitoring words or nonwords for phonological content, or suppressing…

A recent proposal suggests that dyslexic individuals suffer from attentional deficiencies, which impair the ability to selectively process incoming visual information. To investigate this possibility, we employed a spatial cueing procedure in conjunction with a single fixation visual search task measuring thresholds for discriminating the…

This research was aimed at contributing to the current understanding of the underlying factors of naming speed and the causes of naming speed deficits. Forty regular readers and 40 dyslexic university students participated in the study. Electrophysiological (Event-Related Potentials [ERPs]) and behavioral measures were employed. Behavioral…

This paper investigates mathematical skills in Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS), a pathological condition because of congenital alterations of chromosome pair 15. The following questions were addressed: (1) Are mathematical skills in PWS relatively more impaired with respect to other cognitive functions (as has been repeatedly but anecdotally…

In the first part of this study, we investigated effects of item and task type on span performance in a group of aphasic individuals with word processing and STM deficits. Group analyses revealed significant effects of item on span performance with span being greater for digits than for words. We also investigated associations between subjects'…

Switch costs in task switching are commonly attributed to an executive control process of task-set reconfiguration, particularly in studies involving the explicit task-cuing procedure. The authors propose an alternative account of explicitly cued performance that is based on 2 mechanisms: priming of cue encoding from residual activation of cues in…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between working memory and text coherence in Chinese text comprehension. Eighty-six participants completed an operation-character working memory span task to be classified into low-span and high-span readers and a reading task to measure the time to detect inconsistency as well as the…