Working memory, attention, and time: Childhood development and adult function

工作记忆、注意力和时间：童年发展和成人功能

• 批准号: 7383199
• 负责人: NELSON COWAN
• 金额: $ 30.6万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI-COLUMBIA
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 1985
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1985-06-01 至 2012-02-29
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/7383199
• 关键词: Address; Adult; Appendix; Aptitude; Attention; Belief; Book Chapters; Books; Child; Childhood; Clinical Treatment; Code; Cognition Disorders; Cognitive; Cognitive deficits; Collection; Compatible; Complement; Computer information processing; Development; Diagnosis; Digit structure; Educational process of instructing; Ensure; Funding; Individual; Individual Differences; Language Disorders; Learning; Measures; Memory; Modality; Performance; Procedures; Process; Psyche structure; Range; Rate; Reaction Time; Research; Research Personnel; Retrieval; Role; Short-Term Memory; Specific qualifier value; Speech; Speed; Stimulus; Testing; Time; Work; abstracting; age group; clinical Diagnosis; cost; design; elementary school; expectation; improved; insight; journal article; rehearsal; selective attention; theories

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This is a revision of a competing continuation / renewal. The period 7/1/2001 - 6/30/2006 continued work funded since 1984. This period resulted in 1 book, 37 journal articles, and 14 book chapters related to working memory and its development in childhood. Working memory is the collection of processes that keep limited information in an especially accessible form for use in ongoing cognitive tasks. To build on theoretical progress, I emphasize recent research on the roles of two types of processes: those requiring attention and effort, and those taking place automatically. Our research on working memory in elementary school children and adults is sharpening notions of what develops in that time range, including changes in both the scope and control of attention (e.g., Cowan, Fristoe et al., in press). Our child research also provides insight into theories of adult processing. For example, the working memory tasks that best predict mental aptitudes seem to be those for which covert verbal rehearsal cannot be used efficiently; not necessarily tasks that include separate storage and processing components as conventional wisdom suggests (Cowan, Elliott et al., 2005). Our current aims address three basic questions: (1) What is the role of working-memory storage in a form abstract enough to extend across different types of codes (i.e., a central memory)? (2) Is attention used to store information, or only to defend the stored information from interference? Finally, (3) How are capacity and retrieval speed related? Even though correlations between retrieval speed and memory ability are high, experimentally increasing this speed did not improve capacity in children (Cowan, Elliott et al., 2006). To examine the role of attention in working-memory storage, the proposed followup research involves various procedures (e.g., dual-task designs to probe which processes interfere with which types of memory; verbal-spatial association memory tests to identify an abstract, cross-code, central type of memory). Speech response timing is used with multi-word chunk teaching procedures to estimate the capacity of attention- related working memory in chunks. The research could help to clarify a wide range of cognitive disorders that involve working memory (e.g., learning and language disabilities and attention deficits). It could indicate whether normal functioning of working memory depends on attention for storage or just for processing information that is of practical import in formulating plans for clinical treatment and diagnosis.

描述（由申请人提供）：这是对竞争性延续/更新的修订。 2001 年 7 月 1 日至 2006 年 6 月 30 日期间继续自 1984 年以来资助的工作。这一时期产生了与工作记忆及其童年发展相关的 1 本书、37 篇期刊文章和 14 个书籍章节。工作记忆是一系列过程的集合，这些过程以一种特别容易访问的形式保存有限的信息，以便在持续的认知任务中使用。为了在理论进展的基础上，我强调最近对两类过程的作用的研究：那些需要注意力和努力的过程，以及那些自动发生的过程。我们对小学生和成人工作记忆的研究正在加深对该时间范围内发展的认识，包括注意力范围和控制的变化（例如，Cowan、Fristoe 等人，正在出版）。我们的儿童研究还提供了对成人处理理论的见解。例如，最能预测心理能力的工作记忆任务似乎是那些无法有效使用秘密言语排练的任务；不一定像传统观点所建议的那样包括单独的存储和处理组件的任务（Cowan，Elliott 等，2005）。我们当前的目标解决三个基本问题：（1）工作记忆存储的作用是什么，其抽象程度足以扩展到不同类型的代码（即中央记忆）？ （2）注意力是用来存储信息的，还是仅仅为了保护存储的信息免受干扰？最后，（3）容量和检索速度有何关系？尽管检索速度和记忆能力之间的相关性很高，但通过实验提高检索速度并不能提高儿童的能力（Cowan，Elliott 等，2006）。为了检验注意力在工作记忆存储中的作用，拟议的后续研究涉及各种程序（例如，双任务设计来探究哪些过程干扰哪些类型的记忆；言语空间关联记忆测试来识别抽象的、跨代码的、中心类型的记忆）。语音响应计时与多词块教学程序一起使用，以估计块中与注意力相关的工作记忆的容量。该研究可能有助于澄清涉及工作记忆的各种认知障碍（例如学习和语言障碍以及注意力缺陷）。它可以表明工作记忆的正常功能是否依赖于存储的注意力或仅依赖于处理信息的注意力，这对于制定临床治疗和诊断计划具有实际意义。