Age-Related Differences in Control Processes in Verbal and Visuospatial Working Memory: Storage, Transformation, Supervision, and Coordination

Bopp, Kara L.; Verhaeghen, Paul

doi:10.1093/geronb/62.5.p239

Cited by 63 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…The results showed a significant interaction of 300 700 Lag (ms) older, dual task older, single task young, dual task young, single task p < .001). The results thus suggest that the MT differences between young and older adults at Lags 1 and 3 were not simply due to general slowing (see also Bopp & Verhaeghen, 2007;Faust, Balota, Spieler, & Ferraro, 1999).…”

Section: General Slowing Vs Specific Attentional Blink Effectmentioning

confidence: 74%

The Limits of Attention for Visual Perception and Action in Aging

Lee

Hsieh

2009

Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition

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This study aimed to investigate whether aging results in an increased attentional blink effect in older adults as compared to young adults. A rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm was employed in which participants were asked to identify two targets (dual-task condition) presented in rapid succession. These targets were separated by various intervals in a stream of stimuli. The performance for identifying the second target was normally diminished as compared to identification of a single-task target. Various combinations of tasks, such as two perceptual tasks or one perceptual and one action task, as well as different types of pointing action, such as pointing to a displaced target, pointing to a stationary target or pointing to a disappeared target, were manipulated in this study to see if aging may further impact these variables. The results of this study showed that in young adults, successful identification of the first target interfered with identifying the second target, as well as the initiation time (action planning) of pointing to the second target. However, identification of the first target did not interfere with pointing movement time and pointing accuracy, even when the target was displaced, which required online control of action. Conversely, for older adults, successful central identification not only interfered with identifying the second target and with the pointing initiation time, but also interfered with pointing movement time for a displaced target. This suggests that older adults seem to be unable to concurrently identify the first target and correct their already-initiated pointing movement compared to young adults.

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Section: General Slowing Vs Specific Attentional Blink Effectmentioning

confidence: 74%

The Limits of Attention for Visual Perception and Action in Aging

Lee

Hsieh

2009

Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition

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“…After this initial working memory decline, discrimination in tasks from the visuospatial domain displayed a more pronounced decay with advancing age tan those from the verbal domain. Some previous studies have observed performance differences between domains in both sexes (e.g., Bopp and Verhaeghen 2007;Fiore et al 2012;Myerson et al 1999), while others have not (Park et al 2002;Borella et al 2008). Importantly, this uneven decline between domains was observed only when the number of years of education was introduced as a covariant to control for its possible effects on the dependent variables.…”

Section: Domainmentioning

confidence: 82%

“…Although some authors (Park et al 2002;Borella et al 2008) observed that the working memory for both types of material decreased equally across the adult lifespan, results have been controversial in studies that have compared age groups at both extremes. Age-related effects were observed to be greater for visuospatial than for verbal working memory in some studies (e.g., Bopp and Verhaeghen 2007;Fiore et al 2012;Myerson et al 1999), but the opposite was found in another study (Vecchi et al 2005). These contradictory results may be due to the difficulty in equating the tasks for both domains, especially when diverse processing demands are also required, such as in span tasks.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

The decline of verbal and visuospatial working memory across the adult life span

Cansino

Hernández-Ramos

Estrada-Manilla

et al. 2013

AGE

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It has been well established that working memory abilities decrease with advancing age; however, the specific time point in the adult life span at which this deficit begins and the rate at which it advances are still controversial. There is no agreement on whether working memory declines equally for visuospatial and verbal information, and the literature disagrees on how task difficulty may influence this decay. We addressed these questions in a lifespan sample of 1,500 participants between 21 and 80 years old. The n-back task was used, with letters and circles presented at different positions around an imaginary circle, to evaluate working memory in the verbal and visuospatial domains, respectively. The participants' task was to judge whether the current stimulus matched a stimulus that was shown n trials prior. Both domains were evaluated in two levels of difficulty: 1-back and 2-back. The comparison across decades showed that discrimination in the visuospatial and 1-back tasks started to decline earlier in women than in men; however, discrimination was equal between the sexes in the verbal and 2-back tasks. Performance on tasks in the visuospatial domain exhibited more pronounced decline than in those in the verbal domain. The rate of decline in working memory accuracy was superior in 2-back tasks than in 1-back tasks, independent of the domain. These results revealed that the effects of aging on working memory are less dependent on the type of information and more reliant on the resources demanded by the task.

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“…Visual working memory is more strongly correlated with general fluid intelligence, whereas verbal working memory is more strongly associated with crystallized intelligence (Bergman & Almkvist, 2013;Dang, Braeken, Ferrer, & Liu, 2012;Haavisto, & Lehto, 2005; though see Colom, Flores-Mendoza, & Rebollo, 2003;Conway, Cowan, Bunting, Therriault, & Minkoff, 2002;Verguts & De Boeck, 2001), possibly reflecting increased executive demands of common visuospatial working memory tasks (e.g., Vandierendonck, Kemps, Fastame, & Szmalec, 2004). In line with this, research has demonstrated that visuospatial working memory is particularly agesensitive, compared to the verbal component of working memory (Bo, Jennett, Seidler, 2012;Hale et al, 2011;Park et al, 2002;Jenkins, Myerson, Joerding, & Hale, 2000;Jenkins, Myerson, Hale, & Fry, 1999;Verhaeghen, Cerella, Semenec, Leo, Bopp, & Steitz, 2002;Bopp & Verhaeghen, 2007). Thus, separable subcomponents may have different age-related trajectories (Dang et al, 2012).…”

Section: Working Memory In Agingmentioning

confidence: 86%

Visuospatial bootstrapping: Aging and the facilitation of verbal memory by spatial displays.

Calia¹,

Darling²,

Allen³

et al. 2015

Archives of Scientific Psychology

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A B S T R A C TWhen people are presented with a random list of digits to remember over an interval of a few seconds, the cognitive systems that are used are mainly verbal working memory systems, and these are different from those used when remembering visuospatial information. Our previous work has demonstrated that under certain circumstances, visuospatial memory processes can assist verbal memory processes. If a sequence of random numbers is presented for immediate recall in order, memory is better if the digits are displayed on a familiar telephone keypad array compared to either an unfamiliar random keypad or a single item. We previously argued that this was evidence for the existence of processes (described in many modern theories of memory) that could integrate information held in long-term memory (knowledge about the keypad) with short-term visuospatial memory for sequences of locations and short-term verbal memory for sequences of digits. In the current article, we report a study that demonstrates that this pattern remains present in a sample of older (55-76 years) adults compared to a younger sample (19 -35 years). There are important benefits of this identification of the age-resilience of linkages between different types of information in short-term memory. One specific benefit is to theories of aging, but a second, broader, benefit may be that we can capitalize upon this finding to develop strategies and techniques for boosting the efficiency of working memory in older adults, an outcome that would have many benefits to an aging population. S C I E N T I F I C A B S T R A C TRecent studies on verbal immediate serial recall show evidence of the integration of information from verbal and visuospatial short-term memory with long-term memory representations. Verbal serial recall is improved when the information is arranged in a familiar spatially distributed pattern, such as a telephone keypad. This pattern, termed visuospatial bootstrapping, is consistent with the existence within working memory of an episodic buffer (Baddeley, 2000). The present experiment aimed to investigate whether similar results would be obtained in a sample of older adults. Older (55-76) and younger (19 -35) adults carried out visual serial recall in 3 visual display conditions that have previously been used to demonstrate visuospatial bootstrapping. Results demonstrated better performance when digits were presented in a typical telephone keypad display. Although digit serial recall declined with age, there was no evidence that this visuospatial bootstrapping effect differed in size between older and younger adults. Theoretical and practical implications of these results are described.

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Age-Related Differences in Control Processes in Verbal and Visuospatial Working Memory: Storage, Transformation, Supervision, and Coordination

Cited by 63 publications

References 28 publications

The Limits of Attention for Visual Perception and Action in Aging

The Limits of Attention for Visual Perception and Action in Aging

The decline of verbal and visuospatial working memory across the adult life span

Visuospatial bootstrapping: Aging and the facilitation of verbal memory by spatial displays.

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