A new index of semantic short-term memory: Development and validation of the conceptual span task in Spanish

Abstract

Mounting evidence from both cognitive and neuropsychological research points to the importance of conceptual and lexical-semantic contributors to short-term memory performance. Nonetheless, a standardized and well-controlled measure to assess semantic short-term memory was only recently developed for English-speakers, and no parallel measure exists for Spanish-speakers. In the conceptual replication and extension reported here, we develop and validate a Spanish adaptation of the Conceptual Span task as a tool to measure the semantic component of short-term memory. Two versions of the task were validated, the Clustered and the Non-Clustered Conceptual Span task, both in separate samples of 64 and 105 Spanish-speaking university students. We found that both versions of the Conceptual Span task correlate well with another widely used standardized measure of working memory capacity, the Reading Span task. The two versions also correlated, as expected, with discrimination of linguistic congruency as assessed by a semantic anomaly judgment task. Clustered Conceptual Span remained a significant predictor of Reading Span when controlling for several additional cognitive variables, including fluid reasoning, text comprehension, verbal fluency, ideational fluency, and speed of processing. Our results present evidence that the Spanish adaptation of both versions of the Conceptual Span task can yield reliable estimates of the active maintenance of semantic representations in verbal working memory–an under-investigated ability that is involved in diverse domains such as episodic memory retrieval, language processing, and comprehension. Thus, the Conceptual Span task validated here can be employed to predict individual variation in semantic short-term memory capacity in a broad range of research domains.

Word Meaning Contributes to Free Recall Performance in Supraspan Verbal List-Learning Tests

“…Regarding the difference in performance for words and pseudowords, the gain provided by the words emerged only among the women on the STR ( Figure 2 ). This result demonstrates that the word gain can appear during early memory stages, which supplements recent studies highlighting the nature and importance of short-term semantic memory ( Campoy et al, 2015 ; Aizpurua and Koutstaal, 2018 ).…”

“…Regarding the difference in performance for words and pseudowords, the gain provided by the words emerged only among the women on the STR (Figure 2). This result demonstrates that the word gain can appear during early memory stages, which supplements recent studies highlighting the nature and importance of short-term semantic memory (Campoy et al, 2015;Aizpurua and Koutstaal, 2018). To better understand the explicit mnemonics involved in word and pseudoword memory, we determined the strategies the participants used to retain the lists of words and pseudowords.…”

An Improved Integrated Clustering Learning Strategy Based on Three‐Stage Affinity Propagation Algorithm with Density Peak Optimization Theory

“…Zhou and Xu combined the AP theory to resolve the issues of segmentation stability in the image segmentation field [7]. Aizpurua and Koutstaal utilized the affinity propagation clustering algorithm to research new index of semantic short-term memory and obtained better progress [8]. At the same time, scholar Chen et al proposed a novel method for stability-based preference selection based on the AP algorithm [9].…”