Biomedical subjects

John N Towse

Publications and source records attributed to John N Towse.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Working memory period: the endurance of mental representations.

Working memory span assesses the maximum number of items that can be remembered in the face of concurrent processing. Models of working memory differ on several dimensions, yet many rely exclusively on this span procedure for their evidence. Three experiments consider an alternative paradigm that attempts to capture the endurance limits for remembering a fixed number of items during concurrent processing. Eight-year-old children performed two versions of this working memory period measure--operation period and reading period. Period scores show healthy test-retest reliability and external validity for scholastic attainment, comparing well with span scores in these respects. In addition, period is highly correlated with span and shows similar effects of varying the order in which stimuli are presented. We conclude that the durability of representations is an important factor in both span and period.

Achievement↗

PubMed2003

Children's working-memory processes: a response-timing analysis.

Recall response durations were used to clarify processing in working-memory tasks. Experiment 1 examined children's performance in reading span, a task in which sentences were processed and the final word of each sentence was retained for subsequent recall. Experiment 2 examined the development of listening-, counting-, and digit-span task performance. Responses were much longer in the reading-and listening-span tasks than in the other span tasks, suggesting that participants in sentence-based span tasks take time to retrieve the semantic or linguistic structure as cues to recall of the sentence-final words. Response durations in working-memory tasks helped to predict academic skill and achievement, largely separate from the contributions of the memory spans themselves. Response durations thus are important in the interpretation of span task performance.

Child↗

PubMed2002

On the nature of the relationship between processing activity and item retention in children.

The concept of working memory emphasizes the interrelationship between the transient retention of information and concurrent processing activity. Three experiments address this relationship in children between 8 and 17 years of age by examining forgetting when a processing task is interpolated between presentation and recall of the memory items. Unlike previous studies, delivery of interpolated stimuli was under computer control and responses to these stimuli were timed. There were consistent effects of the duration of the interpolated task, but no effects of either its difficulty or similarity to memory material and no qualitative developmental differences in task performance. The absence of an effect of difficulty provides no support for models of working memory in which limited capacity is shared between the dual functions of processing and storage, but is compatible with an alternative "task switching" account. However, task switching did not explain developmental differences in recall. Other aspects of the results suggest that there can be interactions between processing and storage but it is argued that these cannot be straightforwardly explained in terms of either task switching or resource sharing.

Adolescent↗