A shared serial order system for verbal working memory and language production: evidence from aphasia

The role of verbal and visuospatial working memory in rule-based and information-integration category learning was examined. Previously, Maddox, Ashby, Ing, and Pickering found that a sequentially presented verbal working memory task did not affect information-integration learning, but disrupted rule-based learning when the rule was on the spatial frequency of a Gabor stimulus. This pattern was replicated in Experiment 1, in which the same category structures were used, but in which the verbal working memory task was replaced with a visuospatial analog. Experiment 2A examined rule-based learning on an oblique orientation and also found both verbal and visuospatial working memory tasks disrupting learning. Experiment 2B examined rule-based learning on a cardinal orientation and found a minimal effect of the verbal working memory task, but a large effect of the visuospatial working memory task. The conceptual significance of cardinal orientations and the role of visuospatial and verbal working memory in category learning are discussed.

Event Abstract Back to Event A Common Serial Order Mechanism for Verbal Working Memory and Language Production: Evidence from Aphasia Yingxue Tian1*, Heather R. Dial2, Randi Martin1 and Simon Fischer-Baum1 1 Rice University, United States 2 University of Texas at Austin, United States Serial order information is critical in our daily life, from recalling a phone number, or producing phonemes when saying a word, or writing letters when spelling. In the domain of working memory (WM), there is clear evidence for a dissociation of item-identity and serial-order WM (Majerus, 2018). The current study tests two hypotheses about verbal serial order working memory (SOWM). First, that there is a single SOWM capacity that is involved in both verbal and nonverbal WM. Second, that there is a common order processing capacity shared between verbal WM and language production. Both hypotheses are addressed in a multiple-case study approach, looking at patterns of associations and dissociations in serial order performance in patients with memory and language impairments following stroke. Three chronic aphasic patients (M.B., E.V., and S.H.) were identified with impaired forward and backward digit span (span < 4). They were then tested on verbal WM, including item probe (IP), order probe (OP), and serial reconstruction (SRC). Evidence of SOWM impairments includes poor performance on SRC and impaired OP relative to IP (henceforth referred to as adjusted order span). Patient M.B. exhibited impaired verbal SOWM with both digits (SRC = 3.08) and letters (SRC = 2.45, p’s < .05) as well as with the probe tasks (verbal adjusted order span = 50%, p = .03) when compared to ten age- and education-matched control subjects, whereas the other two patients showed no evidence of a verbal SOWM impairment. To test the single SOWM hypothesis, patients were given the same WM battery with nonverbal materials (visuospatial locations). None of the patients showed nonverbal SOWM impairments. Most critically, M.B. exhibited SOWM deficit in the verbal domain but not the nonverbal domain (SRC = 5.33, nonverbal adjusted order span = 59%, p’s > .05). This dissociation between verbal and nonverbal SOWM systems provides clear evidence against the single SOWM hypothesis. To test the hypothesis that verbal SOWM and language production share a common order processing capacity, we next analyzed phoneme/grapheme errors in a corpus of repetition and spelling tasks. Errors in these tasks were categorized into item, order, and omission errors. M.B. produced significantly more phoneme and grapheme order errors than would be expected by chance (p’s < .001 in Monte Carlo simulation), whereas the other two patients did not have a tendency to make order errors in these tasks. The association between M.B.’s order impairment in verbal WM, spoken production and spelling, along with the fact that E.V. and S.H. do not show order impairments in any of those domains, suggests a common serial order mechanism. In sum, our multiple-case study suggests a common mechanism for serial order between verbal WM and the language production system that is distinct from the serial order mechanism used in nonverbal WM. References Majerus, S. (2018). Verbal working memory and the phonological buffer: The question of serial order. Cortex. Keywords: cognitive neuropsychology, Multiple-case, Language production, working memory, serial order Conference: Academy of Aphasia 57th Annual Meeting, Macau, Macao, SAR China, 27 Oct - 29 Oct, 2019. Presentation Type: Poster presentation Topic: Eligible for student award Citation: Tian Y, Dial HR, Martin R and Fischer-Baum S (2019). A Common Serial Order Mechanism for Verbal Working Memory and Language Production: Evidence from Aphasia. Front. Hum. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: Academy of Aphasia 57th Annual Meeting. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2019.01.00113 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 06 May 2019; Published Online: 09 Oct 2019. * Correspondence: Mx. Yingxue Tian, Rice University, Houston, United States, yingxue.tian@rice.edu Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Yingxue Tian Heather R Dial Randi Martin Simon Fischer-Baum Google Yingxue Tian Heather R Dial Randi Martin Simon Fischer-Baum Google Scholar Yingxue Tian Heather R Dial Randi Martin Simon Fischer-Baum PubMed Yingxue Tian Heather R Dial Randi Martin Simon Fischer-Baum Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Rational number understanding is a critical building block for success in more advanced mathematics; however, how rational number magnitudes are conceptualized is not fully understood. In the current study, we used a dual-task working memory (WM) interference paradigm to investigate the dominant type of strategy (i.e., requiring verbal WM resources vs. requiring primarily visuospatial WM resources) used by adults when processing rational number magnitudes presented in both decimal and fraction notation. Analyses revealed no significant differences in involvement of verbal and visuospatial WM, regardless of notation (fractions vs. decimals), indicating that adults rely upon a mix of strategies and WM resources when processing rational number magnitudes. However, this pattern interacted with algebra ability such that those performing better on the algebra assessment relied upon both verbal and visuospatial WM when engaging in rational number comparisons, whereas rational number performance by adults with low algebra fluency was affected only by a simultaneous verbal WM task. Together, results support previous work implicating the involvement of WM resources in rational number processing and is the first study to indicate that the involvement of both verbal and visuospatial WM, as opposed to relying primarily on verbal WM, when processing rational number magnitudes may be indicative of higher mathematical proficiency in the domain of algebra. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)

Most general theories on serial order working memory (WM) assume the existence of position markers that are bound to the to-be-remembered items to keep track of the serial order. So far, the exact cognitive/neural characteristics of these markers have remained largely underspecified, while direct empirical evidence for their existence is mostly lacking. In the current study we demonstrate that retrieval from verbal serial order WM can be facilitated or hindered by spatial cuing: begin elements of a verbal WM sequence are retrieved faster after cuing the left side of space, while end elements are retrieved faster after cuing the right side of space. In direct complement to our previous work—where we showed the reversed impact of WM retrieval on spatial processing—we argue that the current findings provide us with a crucial piece of evidence suggesting a direct and functional involvement of space in verbal serial order WM. We outline the idea that serial order in verbal WM is coded within a spatial coordinate system with spatial attention being involved when searching through WM, and we discuss how this account can explain several hallmark observations related to serial order WM.

Verbal working memory is poorer for children with hearing loss than for peers with normal hearing (NH), even with cochlear implantation and early intervention. Poor verbal working memory can affect academic performance, especially in higher grades, making this deficit a significant problem. This study examined the stability of verbal working memory across middle childhood, tested working memory in adolescents with NH or cochlear implants (CIs), explored whether signal enhancement can improve verbal working memory, and tested two hypotheses proposed to explain the poor verbal working memory of children with hearing loss: (a) Diminished auditory experience directly affects executive functions, including working memory; (b) degraded auditory inputs inhibit children's abilities to recover the phonological structure needed for encoding verbal material into storage. Fourteen-year-olds served as subjects: 55 with NH; 52 with CIs. Immediate serial recall tasks were used to assess working memory. Stimuli consisted of nonverbal, spatial stimuli and four kinds of verbal, acoustic stimuli: nonrhyming and rhyming words, and nonrhyming words with two kinds of signal enhancement: audiovisual and indexical. Analyses examined (a) stability of verbal working memory across middle childhood, (b) differences in verbal and nonverbal working memory, (c) effects of signal enhancement on recall, (d) phonological processing abilities, and (e) source of the diminished verbal working memory in adolescents with cochlear implants. Verbal working memory remained stable across middle childhood. Adolescents across groups performed similarly for nonverbal stimuli, but those with CIs displayed poorer recall accuracy for verbal stimuli; signal enhancement did not improve recall. Poor phonological sensitivity largely accounted for the group effect. The central executive for working memory is not affected by hearing loss or cochlear implantation. Instead, the phonological deficit faced by adolescents with CIs denigrates the representation in storage and augmenting the signal does not help.

This article reviews current models of verbal working memory and considers the role of language comprehension and long-term memory in the ability to maintain and order verbal information for short periods of time. While all models of verbal working memory posit some interaction with long-term memory, few have considered the character of these long-term representations or how they might affect performance on verbal working memory tasks. Similarly, few models have considered how comprehension processes and production processes might affect performance in verbal working memory tasks. Modern theories of comprehension emphasize that people learn a vast web of correlated information about the language and the world and must activate that information from long-term memory to cope with the demands of language input. To date, there has been little consideration in theories of verbal working memory for how this rich input from comprehension would affect the nature of temporary memory. There has also been relatively little attention to the degree to which language production processes naturally manage serial order of verbal information. The authors argue for an emergent model of verbal working memory supported by a rich, distributed long-term memory for language. On this view, comprehension processes provide encoding in verbal working memory tasks, and production processes maintenance, serial ordering, and recall. Moreover, the computational capacity to maintain and order information varies with language experience. Implications for theories of working memory, comprehension, and production are considered.

Previous research showed a significant association between mathematics and working memory (WM). However, evidence regarding the different effects of verbal and visuospatial WM on mathematical abilities was very limited. The current research aims to explore the relationship between verbal and visuospatial WM with mathematical abilities, and how this relationship is moderated by age and math domains. We also wonder whether the results would change when we use several tests for each component and use a latent variable approach for more reliable measurement. 131 first graders and 144 fifth graders from a primary school in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China, participated our research. All participants completed three verbal and three visuospatial WM tasks, mathematics tests, and fluid intelligence test. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis was used to examine the pattern of relations among these constructs. The results of hierarchical multiple regression analysis showed that verbal WM significantly predicted mathematics achievement for fifth graders, while failed for first graders. However, visuospatial WM played a substantive role in both graders' mathematical performance. The different role of the two WM components also depend on various fields of mathematics. Our results indicated the distinct influence of verbal and visuospatial WM on primary school students' mathematical abilities and highlighted the developmental and domain-specific effects of WM on mathematics.

The cerebellum is often active in imaging studies of verbal working memory, consistent with a putative role in articulatory rehearsal. While patients with cerebellar damage occasionally exhibit a mild impairment on standard neuropsychological tests of working memory, these tests are not diagnostic for exploring these processes in detail. The current study was designed to determine whether damage to the cerebellum is associated with impairments on a range of verbal working memory tasks, and if so, under what circumstances. Moreover, we assessed the hypothesis that these impairments are related to impaired rehearsal mechanisms. Patients with damage to the cerebellum (n = 15) exhibited a selective deficit in verbal working memory: spatial forward and backward spans were normal, but forward and backward verbal spans were lower than controls. While the differences were significant, digit spans were relatively preserved, especially in comparison to the dramatic reductions typically observed in classic 'short-term memory' patients with perisylvian brain damage. The patients tended to be more impaired on a verbal version compared to a spatial version of a working memory task with a long delay and this impairment was correlated with overall symptom and dysarthria severity. These results are consistent with a contribution of the cerebellum to rehearsal and suggest that inclusion of a delay before recall is especially detrimental in individuals with cerebellar damage. However, when we examined markers of rehearsal (i.e. word-length and articulatory suppression effects) in an immediate serial recall task, we found that qualitative aspects of the patients' rehearsal strategies were unaffected. We propose that the cerebellum may contribute to verbal working memory during the initial phonological encoding and/or by strengthening memory traces rather than by fundamentally subserving covert articulatory rehearsal.

Background. Working memory (WM) declines with ageing. Despite a large body of relevant studies, changes in verbal and nonverbal WM, relevant specifically for healthy aging, and their brain correlates, remain understudied. Objectives. Our study aimed to analyse changes in maintenance and updating of verbal and nonverbal material in WM in healthy ageing (i.e., the absence of cognitive decline, neurological and mental disorders, as well as the history of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events and oncological diseases). Study Participants. The final groups were equivalent in terms of education level and gender composition and comprised 16 older (65.7 ± 4.4 years) and 16 younger (23.3 ± 4.9 years) right-handed participants. Methods. We analysed the behavioural data from the project wherein the brain activity was registered via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) while the participants performed maximally comparable verbal and nonverbal versions of the Sternberg and n-back tasks developed by us earlier. This was done to overcome the methodological limitations of previous studies which used verbal and nonverbal WM tasks that addressed different processes (e.g., updating of verbal or maintenance of non-verbal material in WM), and had different structure, stimuli, and difficulty. Neurophysiological data were not analysed in the current article. Results. Older participants demonstrated slower responses in all tasks than the younger participants. Response accuracy in the Sternberg task and the 0-back task was independent of age, whereas it decreased in the 2-back task by 5–10% in the older participants compared to the younger group. Some evidence in favour of a more prominent decrease of nonverbal vs. verbal WM in older participants was observed. Conclusions. Maintenance of material in WM is not affected by healthy ageing. Decline in updating observed in high WM load may be considered as a true age-related change of WM.

Objective Many studies report a deficit in working memory in children with Developmental Dyslexia (DD) and Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) compared to children with Typical Development (TD). In this study, we questioned the working memory profile of children with co-occurring Developmental Dyslexia and Developmental Coordination Disorder (DD-DCD). First, we hypothesized that children with DD would have a more substantial deficit in verbal working memory, while children with DCD would have a more substantial deficit in visuospatial working memory. For the comorbid group, we postulated a deficit in both the verbal and visuospatial domains. Second, we determined whether we could correctly distinguish between the four groups based on their working memory profiles. Method 47 children with DD, 22 children with DCD, 27 children with DD-DCD, and 42 TD children aged from 7.6 to 12.6 years were tested on the phonological loop, the visuospatial sketchpad, and the central executive using the Digit Span and Wechsler’s Block-tapping tests. Results Children with DD had a deficit in verbal working memory including a specific deficit in the phonological loop and children with DCD had a deficit in visuospatial working memory. Comorbid children had poorer performance in verbal working memory (like group with DD) and in visuospatial working memory (like group with DCD). Exploratory cluster analysis resulted in four subgroups: (1) one cluster with good working memory performance made up of most of the TD children; (2) one cluster with a phonological loop deficit mainly made up of the children with DD; (3) one cluster with poor visuospatial working memory capacities mostly made up of the children with DCD (± DD) and (4) one cluster with average performance made up of children from all the groups. Conclusion Our results underline the importance of taking comorbidity into account when testing working memory in children with learning disabilities.

BackgroundMath anxiety (MA) and math achievement (MATH) are related, but the direction of their relationship and their predictors are still unclear. AimsWe tested whether MATH predicts MA (Deficit Theory), MA predicts MATH (Debilitating Anxiety Theory), or whether MA and MATH have reciprocal relationships (Reciprocal Theory). Further, we established whether MA at T0, T1, and T2 and MATH at T1 and T2 were predicted by gender, general anxiety, fluid intelligence, verbal and visuospatial working memory, and symbolic and non-symbolic numerical representations tested at T0. SampleWe tested 337 Polish primary school children. MethodsWe analyzed longitudinal data at three time points: T0 – the beginning of the first grade, T1 – the end of the first grade, T2 – the end of the second grade. ResultsMATH at T1 predicted MA at T2 and MA at T1 predicted MATH at T2 (supporting the Reciprocal Theory). Additionally, MATH at T1 was predicted by fluid intelligence, visuospatial working memory, and symbolic numerical representation; MATH at T2 by fluid intelligence, verbal working memory, and MATH at T1. MA at T0 was predicted by general anxiety and symbolic numerical representation, MA at T1 by MA at T0 and gender, and MA at T2 by MA at T1. ConclusionsThe results support the Reciprocal Theory of the MA and MATH relationship. MA is predicted by general anxiety, knowledge of mathematical symbols and gender. MATH is predicted by fluid intelligence, working memory and knowledge of mathematical symbols.

The present study aimed to examine how visual skills, verbal working memory, visuospatial working memory, and other general cognitive skills (inhibitory control, attention, and decision speed) were simultaneously correlated with the early acquisition of reading among kindergarten children. A total of 99 Chinese children were tested individually on the Chinese character recognition task, the block design task, the digit span task, the visuospatial sketchpad task, the continuous performance task (CPT), the flanker task, and the choice reaction time task. The results showed that visual skills and working memory accounted for 15% of the unique variance in character reading, whereas other general cognitive skills, including decision speed, inhibitory control and attention, did not significantly explain the variance in character reading when visual skills and working memory were considered. Specifically, verbal working memory, rather than visuospatial working memory, explained the unique variance in children's learning of character reading. These findings highlighted that visual skills and verbal working memory were among the most important precursors of reading in children at the beginning stage of learning Chinese characters.

Verbal working memory and executive deficits have been observed in ecstasy users. The present study sought to establish whether these also extended to visuo-spatial working memory. Thirty-six current ecstasy users, 12 former users (abstinent for at least 6 months) and 31 individuals that had never used ecstasy were tested on a maintenance plus type visuo-spatial working memory task. The task required participants to recall a sequence of specially marked cells in a four-by-four matrix display while at the same time performing a concurrent visual judgement task. Both the current and former user groups registered impairments relative to nonusers. These remained significant following statistical controls for a range of potentially confounding variables including the use of various other drugs during the 3 months prior to testing. Users were unimpaired on a simple spatial span measure suggesting that the deficits observed reflected the executive aspects of the spatial working memory task. Also consistent with executive involvement, statistical controls for measures of verbal working memory performance (computation span) removed half of the ecstasy-related variance in spatial working memory. The possibility that the pattern of results obtained might reflect some general impairment in information processing efficiency is discussed.

The present study investigated verbal and spatial working memory (WM) functioning in individuals with the neuro-developmental disorder Williams syndrome (WS) using WM component tasks. While there is strong evidence of WM impairments in WS, previous research has focused on short-term memory and has neglected assessment of executive components of WM. There is a particular lack of consensus concerning the profile of verbal WM functioning in WS. Here, WS participants were compared to typically developing participants matched for (1) verbal ability and (2) spatial ability ( N = 14 in each of the 3 groups). Individuals with WS were impaired on verbal WM tasks, both those involving short-term maintenance of information and executive manipulation, in comparison to verbal-matched controls. Surprisingly, individuals with WS were not impaired on a spatial task assessing short-term maintenance of information in memory (remembering spatial locations) compared to spatial-matched controls. They were, however, impaired on a spatial executive WM task requiring the manipulation of spatial information in memory. The present study suggests that individuals with WS show WM impairments that extend to both verbal and spatial domains, although spatial deficits are selective to executive aspects of WM function.

The aim of the present study was to examine the role of age in the organization of verbal working memory, visuospatial working memory and inhibition; specifically whether these constructs could be considered unitary or separate in children aged 7 to 12 years (n = 164) and in adolescents aged 13 to 16 years (n = 75) using a multi-group confirmatory factor analysis. Results suggested that verbal working memory, visuospatial working memory and inhibition improved from childhood to adolescence. However, improvement was not followed by a change in the organization of these components. Verbal working memory, visuospatial working memory and inhibition constituted separable but associated constructs in children and in adolescents.