Mechanisms of Working Memory Capacity Limits and Their Development

工作记忆容量限制的机制及其发展

• 批准号: 10200857
• 负责人: NELSON COWAN
• 金额: $ 46.69万
• 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 2024-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10200857
• 关键词: Acoustics; Address; Adopted; Adult; Age; Aging; Attention; Child; Childhood; Cognition; Color; Development; Dyslexia; Educational process of instructing; Familiarity; Frequencies; Funding; Goals; Grant; Growth; Knowledge; Language; Learning; Learning Disorders; Length; Maintenance; Measures; Memory; Methods; Mind; Modality; Participant; Pattern; Pattern Formation; Peripheral; Physiologic pulse; Problem Solving; Procedures; Reproduction; Research; Residual state; Role; School-Age Population; Schools; Series; Short-Term Memory; Speed; Spottings; Stimulus; Structure; Tactile; Techniques; Testing; Texture; Time; Variant; Visual; Work; base; cognitive function; distraction; improved; innovation; language impairment; long term memory; mathematical model; novel; rehearsal; reproductive; response; theories; trend; young adult

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT BACKGROUND: Working memory (WM) is the limited information retained in an active state for use in ongoing cognition. Improvements in WM from 6-14 years are critically important for how children do diverse cognitive functions like reasoning, problem-solving, and language. When teaching children (typical or challenged), little is known about how to take into account WM limits because we do not yet understand what factors contribute to typical WM development. Research by the P.I. under Grant R01-HD-21338 shows that accounts of WM development that have been proposed are insufficient (e.g., improvement in ignoring distraction or in item familiarity). We have shown this using methods in which the factors in question were experimentally controlled in new ways (e.g., capacity growth was observed independent of any distraction or familiarity effects). In my theoretical framework, WM capacity limits come from how many items can be retained concurrently in the focus of attention with enough detail to guide responses. In a new developmental hypothesis within that account, the number of WM items may remain fixed but WM develops in the richness of features within items and patterns noticed across items. Older children and adults would use features and patterns to minimize the need for attention to WM items. The RESEARCH GOAL is to assess this hypothesis with variants of new dual-set (e.g., visual+acoustic) recognition tasks, to identify roles of attention, patterns, and features in typically developing children and young adults. SPECIFIC AIMS are to uncover these bases of WM development in four ways. (1) We assess whether it is not just the number of items or objects in WM that increases in development, but the completeness of their feature representations. (2) Inasmuch as our previous work demonstrated the importance of general attention to retain information in WM, we explore a factor that may free up attention in more mature participants. Older children may engage in rapid pattern formation and memorization to “off-load” materials out of the focus of attention, freeing attention for subsequent input and WM maintenance. We examine whether extra structure in the material allows younger children to off-load more like older ones do. (3) We recently found that off-loading occurs for acoustic and verbal lists (words or tones) much more than for visual arrays, reducing interference between acoustic items and other items. We will investigate the basis of these intriguing findings. Possibly, sequential lists of colored spots, like acoustic sequences, will allow better off-loading than do arrays of spots. We also will examine whether vibrotactile sequences compete with visual objects for attention, more than do acoustic items. Last, (4) we adopt experimental techniques from recent adult work to determine whether attention-dependent and attention-free mechanisms both develop similarly in terms of a) an increased numbers of items in WM, or b) increased item precision; their mechanisms may differ. IMPACT: How cognition should be engaged in educating children and addressing learning disorders depends on basic mechanisms of WM development, which we must uncover.

项目概要/摘要 背景：工作记忆（WM）是在活动状态下保留的有限信息，用于 持续的认知。 6-14 岁 WM 的改善对于儿童如何实现多样化至关重要 认知功能，如推理、解决问题和语言。教孩子时（典型的或 挑战），关于如何考虑 WM 限制知之甚少，因为我们还不明白什么 影响典型 WM 发展的因素。 P.I. 的研究根据 Grant R01-HD-21338 表明 已提出的 WM 发展说明还不够充分（例如，忽视改进 分心或项目熟悉）。我们已经使用一些方法证明了这一点，其中所讨论的因素是 以新的方式进行实验控制（例如，观察到容量增长独立于任何干扰或 熟悉效应）。在我的理论框架中，WM 容量限制来自于可以处理的项目数量。 同时保留在关注焦点中，并提供足够的细节来指导响应。在新的发展时期 假设在该帐户中，WM 项目的数量可能保持不变，但 WM 的发展随着项目的丰富性而发展。 项目内的特征以及跨项目注意到的模式。年龄较大的儿童和成人会使用功能和 模式，以尽量减少对 WM 项目的关注。研究目标是评估这一假设 通过新的双组（例如视觉+听觉）识别任务的变体，识别注意力的角色、模式、 以及典型发育儿童和年轻人的特征。具体目标是揭示这些基础 WM 发展有四种方式。 (1) 我们评估是否不仅仅是 WM 中的项目或对象的数量 发展的增加，但其特征表示的完整性。 (2) 就我们之前的 工作证明了普遍关注在 WM 中保留信息的重要性，我们探索了一个因素 可以释放更成熟的参与者的注意力。年龄较大的孩子可能会快速形成模式并 记忆将材料从注意力焦点中“转移”出来，从而将注意力释放到后续的输入和处理上 WM维护。我们检查材料中的额外结构是否可以让年幼的孩子卸下负担 更像年长的人。 (3) 我们最近发现声音和语言列表（单词或单词）会发生卸载 音调）比视觉阵列要多得多，减少了声学项目和其他项目之间的干扰。我们将 调查这些有趣的发现的基础。可能是彩色点的连续列表，例如声学 序列，将比点阵列更好地卸载。我们还将检查振动触觉是否 序列与视觉对象争夺注意力，比声音对象更是如此。最后，（4）我们采用 最近成人工作中的实验技术，用于确定注意力依赖型和无注意力型 机制在以下方面的发展类似：a) WM 中项目数量的增加，或 b) 项目数量的增加 精确;它们的机制可能不同。影响：认知应该如何参与教育儿童 解决学习障碍取决于 WM 发展的基本机制，我们必须揭示这一机制。