Following instructions is part of our daily lives and a very important human attribute. It makes implementation of new arbitrary behavior rather effortless in comparison to trial and error, facilitating our learning process. Despite the fundamental role for our behavioral regulation, little is known of how instructions are represented in working memory.
How do we plan an action and prepare ourselves to react in a specific way to a new and unpracticed task? Binding mechanisms have been shown to take part in action planning (Hommel, 1998; Stoet & Hommel, 1999, 2002); but does the mere instruction of an action result in binding of stimulus-response (S-R)? This is a tricky question to test experimentally since an instructed S-R mapping must be presented only once before becoming implemented.
Stoet & Hommel (1999) proposed a dual task paradigm to study binding mechanisms on action planning of implemented instructions. The so called ABBA paradigm is composed by Task A and Task B, with task B embedded in task A. Figure 1α illustrates the rationale for the paradigm, in which Stimulus A is always shown before Stimulus B and is to be responded for only after response to Stimulus B has been performed. By manipulating response-feature overlapping between A and B tasks (i.e: using the same hand to respond to both stimuli or not), they showed that planning an action (Response B) is impaired if it shares features with another, already planned action held in working memory (Response A) (Stoet & Hommel, 1999).
The argument is that planning an action involves binding between the features that specify the intended action, so that the bound feature codes are temporarily not readily available for the planning and cont...
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...ated to test various other hypotheses on the field. One possible and easy manipulation is to introduce an articulatory suppression task to be performed concurrently in order to investigate whether the results encountered are due to verbal coding. In a non reported study, Wencke et al. (2007) claimed to have found similar results when subjects used a tongue depressor in their mouths in order to suppress subvocal articulatory activities while doing the ABBA tasks.
As reproducibility is an important step when dealing with a new paradigm in a relatively new research field, our aim in this paper was to try to reproduce experiment 1 from Wencke et al. (2007) with and without articulatory suppression. We tried to keep the ABBA paradigm and stimuli as similar as those used by them, but some slight differences were inevitable and will be explained in the methods session.
Eichenbaum, H., Otto, T., & Cohen, N. J. (1992). The hippocampus—what does it do? Behavioral
Quote 11: demonstrates the need to control the sound when there is a sudden change in articulation.
Seikel, J. A., King, D. W., & Drumright, D. G. (2010). 12. Anatomy & physiology for speech,
In conclusion, Baddeley and Hitch (1974) developed the working memory in response to the multi store model and introduced four mechanisms involved; the phonological loop, visual-spaital sketchpad, episodic buffer and the central executive. The four components are also largely supported by a good wealth of evidence (in Smith, 2007).
Lepage, M. & Richer, F. (2000). Frontal brain lesions affect the use of advance information during response planning. Behavioral Neuroscience, 1034-1040.
The Effects of Levels of Processing on Memory PB1: Identify the aim of the research and state the experimental/alternative hypothesis/es. (credited in the report mark scheme) To show how different levels of processing affects the memory. “People who process information deeply (i.e. semantic processing) tend to remember more than those who process information shallowly (i.e. visual processing). ” PB2: Explain why a directional or non-directional experimental/alternative hypothesis/es has been selected. (I mark) I have used a directional experimental hypothesis because past research, such as that by Craik and Tulving (1975) has proved this. PB3:
Memory is a group of related mental processes that are involved in acquiring, storing, and retrieving information (Hockenberry and Hocenberry page 232). I will be addressing two specific types of memory: short-term memory and long-term memory. Short-term memory holds temporary information transferred from sensory memory or long-term memory. Sensory memory is the first stage of memory and obtains information for a brief amount of time. Short-term memory is also called active memory and is stored in the prefrontal cortex which is the most active part of the brain during an activity. Short-term memory can hold information for roughly twenty seconds, but sensory memory holds information for a shorter amount of time. We usually store things such
Wessinger, C.M., Clapham, E. (2009) Cognitive Neuroscience: An Overview , Encylopedia of Neuroscience. 12(4) 1117-1122.
Furthermore this article expands upon this subcategory of memory by describing the two types of tasks involved with it: verbal-production ta...
This essay will firstly briefly describe the theories and important facts about the original multi-store model of memory (MSM) and the working memory model (WMM).
Gluck, M. A., Mercado, E., & Myers, C. E. (2014). Learning and memory: From brain to behavior (2nd ed.). New York: Worth Publishers.
Rolls, E. T., Dempere-Marco, L., & Deco, G. (2013). Holding Multiple Items in Short Term Memory: A Neural Mechanism. Plos ONE, 8(4), 1-13. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0061078
The 'Standard'. Cognition (8th ed.). Geneseo, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Qinglin, Z., Jiang, Q., & Guikang, C. (2004).
2011, p281). Regardless of their differences or similarities however, both have played an important part in the study of learning. With operant conditioning allowing to condition more complex behaviours that can be done with classical conditioning, and with classical conditioning being what helped discover operant conditioning in the first place, it can be argued here that the two are complementary. Indeed, one cannot speak of operant conditioning without mentioning classical conditioning, and vice
Weiner, I. Healy, A. Freedheim, D. Proctor,R.W., Schinka,J.A. (2003) Handbook of Psychology: Experimental psychology,18, pp 500