Matching Items (8)
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- All Subjects: working memory
- Creators: Azuma, Tamiko
Description
Frequency effects favoring high print-frequency words have been observed in frequency judgment memory tasks. Healthy young adults performed frequency judgment tasks; one group performed a single task while another group did the same task while alternating their attention to a secondary task (mathematical equations). Performance was assessed by correct and error responses, reaction times, and accuracy. Accuracy and reaction times were analyzed in terms of memory load (task condition), number of repetitions, effect of high vs. low print-frequency, and correlations with working memory span. Multinomial tree analyses were also completed to investigate source vs. item memory and revealed a mirror effect in episodic memory experiments (source memory), but a frequency advantage in span tasks (item memory). Interestingly enough, we did not observe an advantage for high working memory span individuals in frequency judgments, even when participants split their attention during the dual task (similar to a complex span task). However, we concluded that both the amount of attentional resources allocated and prior experience with an item affect how it is stored in memory.
ContributorsPeterson, Megan Paige (Author) / Azuma, Tamiko (Thesis advisor) / Gray, Shelley (Committee member) / Liss, Julie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
When people look for things in their environment they use a target template - a mental representation of the object they are attempting to locate - to guide their attention around a scene and to assess incoming visual input to determine if they have found that for which they are searching. However, unlike laboratory experiments, searchers in the real-world rarely have perfect knowledge regarding the appearance of their target. In five experiments (with nearly 1,000 participants), we examined how the precision of the observer's template affects their ability to conduct visual search. Specifically, we simulated template imprecision in two ways: First, by contaminating our searchers' templates with inaccurate features, and second, by introducing extraneous features to the template that were unhelpful. In those experiments we recorded the eye movements of our searchers in order to make inferences regarding the extent to which attentional guidance and decision-making are hindered by template imprecision. We also examined a third way in which templates may become imprecise; namely, that they may deteriorate over time. Overall, our findings support a dual-function theory of the target template, and highlight the importance of examining template precision in future research.
ContributorsHout, Michael C (Author) / Goldinger, Stephen D (Thesis advisor) / Azuma, Tamiko (Committee member) / Homa, Donald (Committee member) / Reichle, Erik (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Previous research has shown that people can implicitly learn repeated visual contexts and use this information when locating relevant items. For example, when people are presented with repeated spatial configurations of distractor items or distractor identities in visual search, they become faster to find target stimuli in these repeated contexts over time (Chun and Jiang, 1998; 1999). Given that people learn these repeated distractor configurations and identities, might they also implicitly encode semantic information about distractors, if this information is predictive of the target location? We investigated this question with a series of visual search experiments using real-world stimuli within a contextual cueing paradigm (Chun and Jiang, 1998). Specifically, we tested whether participants could learn, through experience, that the target images they are searching for are always located near specific categories of distractors, such as food items or animals. We also varied the spatial consistency of target locations, in order to rule out implicit learning of repeated target locations. Results suggest that participants implicitly learned the target-predictive categories of distractors and used this information during search, although these results failed to reach significance. This lack of significance may have been due the relative simplicity of the search task, however, and several new experiments are proposed to further investigate whether repeated category information can benefit search.
ContributorsWalenchok, Stephen C (Author) / Goldinger, Stephen D (Thesis advisor) / Azuma, Tamiko (Committee member) / Homa, Donald (Committee member) / Hout, Michael C (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Military veterans have a significantly higher incidence of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), depression, and Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) compared to civilians. Military veterans also represent a rapidly growing subgroup of college students, due in part to the robust and financially incentivizing educational benefits under the Post-9/11 GI Bill. The overlapping cognitively impacting symptoms of service-related conditions combined with the underreporting of mTBI and psychiatric-related conditions, make accurate assessment of cognitive performance in military veterans challenging. Recent research findings provide conflicting information on cognitive performance patterns in military veterans. The purpose of this study was to determine whether service-related conditions and self-assessments predict performance on complex working memory and executive function tasks for military veteran college students. Sixty-one military veteran college students attending classes at Arizona State University campuses completed clinical neuropsychological tasks and experimental working memory and executive function tasks. The results revealed that a history of mTBI significantly predicted poorer performance in the areas of verbal working memory and decision-making. Depression significantly predicted poorer performance in executive function related to serial updating. In contrast, the commonly used clinical neuropsychological tasks were not sensitive service-related conditions including mTBI, PTSD, and depression. The differing performance patterns observed between the clinical tasks and the more complex experimental tasks support that researchers and clinicians should use tests that sufficiently tax verbal working memory and executive function when evaluating the subtle, higher-order cognitive deficits associated with mTBI and depression.
ContributorsGallagher, Karen Louise (Author) / Azuma, Tamiko (Thesis advisor) / Liss, Julie (Committee member) / Lavoie, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
Previous research from Rajsic et al. (2015, 2017) suggests that a visual form of confirmation bias arises during visual search for simple stimuli, under certain conditions, wherein people are biased to seek stimuli matching an initial cue color even when this strategy is not optimal. Furthermore, recent research from our lab suggests that varying the prevalence of cue-colored targets does not attenuate the visual confirmation bias, although people still fail to detect rare targets regardless of whether they match the initial cue (Walenchok et al. under review). The present investigation examines the boundary conditions of the visual confirmation bias under conditions of equal, low, and high cued-target frequency. Across experiments, I found that: (1) People are strongly susceptible to the low-prevalence effect, often failing to detect rare targets regardless of whether they match the cue (Wolfe et al., 2005). (2) However, they are still biased to seek cue-colored stimuli, even when such targets are rare. (3) Regardless of target prevalence, people employ strategies when search is made sufficiently burdensome with distributed items and large search sets. These results further support previous findings that the low-prevalence effect arises from a failure to perceive rare items (Hout et al., 2015), while visual confirmation bias is a bias of attentional guidance (Rajsic et al., 2015, 2017).
ContributorsWalenchok, Stephen Charles (Author) / Goldinger, Stephen D (Thesis advisor) / Azuma, Tamiko (Committee member) / Homa, Donald (Committee member) / Hout, Michael C (Committee member) / McClure, Samuel M. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
The increase of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) cases in recent war history has increased the urgency of research regarding how veterans are affected by TBIs. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of TBI on speech recognition in noise. The AzBio Sentence Test was completed for signal-to-noise ratios (S/N) from -10 dB to +15 dB for a control group of ten participants and one US military veteran with history of service-connected TBI. All participants had normal hearing sensitivity defined as thresholds of 20 dB or better at frequencies from 250-8000 Hz in addition to having tympanograms within normal limits. Comparison of the data collected on the control group versus the veteran suggested that the veteran performed worse than the majority of the control group on the AzBio Sentence Test. Further research with more participants would be beneficial to our understanding of how veterans with TBI perform on speech recognition tests in the presence of background noise.
ContributorsCorvasce, Erica Marie (Author) / Peterson, Kathleen (Thesis director) / Williams, Erica (Committee member) / Azuma, Tamiko (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
An increasing number of veterans are transitioning from military service to college. Critical to academic success is the process of decision-making, which previous research has found to be influenced by a variety of factors including anxiety and working memory (WM). Many service-related conditions often influence anxiety and WM, and given the high prevalence of these conditions among veterans, the present study aimed to analyze the effects of working memory and anxiety on decision-making behavior in U.S. Military Veterans. Participants completed a large test battery including tasks assessing WM skills (Symmetry Span Task), anxiety (Beck Anxiety Inventory), and decision-making (Iowa Gambling Task). The study results indicated that WM and anxiety both play roles in decision-making performance in young military veterans. High anxiety is related to increased avoidance of adverse outcomes in decision-making for U.S. Military Veterans, while lower working memory span is associated with greater risk-taking behavior. This study provides both functional and clinical implications into areas of possible intervention that need to be assessed in military veterans, as well as modifications to these assessments that need to be made in order to appropriately measure decision-making behavior. Future work will be done in order to more effectively analyze the adverse impacts of service-related conditions and the ways in which intervention can be implemented in order to minimize these effects.
ContributorsTully, Mckayla Lynne (Author) / Azuma, Tamiko (Thesis director) / Gallagher, Karen (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor) / Department of Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
Purpose: Children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have been found to have central executive deficits in working memory as well as less academic success than children with typical development. The purpose of this study was to determine which components of central executive function were most closely related to parental rating scores of attention.
Method: Two hundred twenty three 2nd graders with typical development, dyslexia, developmental language disorder (DLD), or dyslexia/DLD completed three central executive tasks from the Comprehensive Assessment Battery for Children–Working Memory (Gray, Alt, Hogan, Green, & Cowan, n.d.). Parents of the children completed the ADHD Rating Scale-IV: Home Version for their child. None of the participants had been diagnosed with ADD/ADHD
Results: When diagnostic group performance was compared we found significant differences on each central executive task. When ADHD group performance was compared we found a significant between-group performance only on the n-back visual task with the high-risk group scoring lower than the other two groups. ADHD rating scores predicted a significant amount of variance for each central executive task, but percentages were small (3%-6%).
Discussion: Working memory is known to be related to attention control. Stronger attentional control is associated with a higher working memory performance. Our study showed that children most at risk for ADD/ADHD based on parent ratings scored lowest on the visuospatial task, likely because rehearsal of visuospatial information is not possible so relies more heavily on attention. This study is a step toward considering how attention affects working memory performance so that both can be considered when designing instruction and interventions.
Method: Two hundred twenty three 2nd graders with typical development, dyslexia, developmental language disorder (DLD), or dyslexia/DLD completed three central executive tasks from the Comprehensive Assessment Battery for Children–Working Memory (Gray, Alt, Hogan, Green, & Cowan, n.d.). Parents of the children completed the ADHD Rating Scale-IV: Home Version for their child. None of the participants had been diagnosed with ADD/ADHD
Results: When diagnostic group performance was compared we found significant differences on each central executive task. When ADHD group performance was compared we found a significant between-group performance only on the n-back visual task with the high-risk group scoring lower than the other two groups. ADHD rating scores predicted a significant amount of variance for each central executive task, but percentages were small (3%-6%).
Discussion: Working memory is known to be related to attention control. Stronger attentional control is associated with a higher working memory performance. Our study showed that children most at risk for ADD/ADHD based on parent ratings scored lowest on the visuospatial task, likely because rehearsal of visuospatial information is not possible so relies more heavily on attention. This study is a step toward considering how attention affects working memory performance so that both can be considered when designing instruction and interventions.
ContributorsCleveland, Alexandra (Author) / Gray, Shelley (Thesis director) / Azuma, Tamiko (Committee member) / College of Health Solutions (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-12