scholarly journals Experimental Studies on Memory in Conference Interpretation

2002 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 622-628 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valeria Daró

Abstract Several studies in cognitive psychology and neuropsychology have shown that memory is not a unitary function of human cognition, since it comprises several multi-modal systems, which can be mutually independent. This article describes: a) the present state of the art on the functional organization of the most relevant memory systems (working memory and explicit vs. implicit memory systems), and b) what experimental studies have so far revealed about the role ofmnestic systems during the process of simultaneous and consecutive interpretation. Since these studies suggest that memory is multifaceted, there cannot and should not be a single, unique way to teach and acquire the techniques and strategies of these two types of conference interpretation, which sometimes are erroneously considered reciprocally complementary.

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (12) ◽  
pp. 4162-4178
Author(s):  
Emily Jackson ◽  
Suze Leitão ◽  
Mary Claessen ◽  
Mark Boyes

Purpose Previous research into the working, declarative, and procedural memory systems in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) has yielded inconsistent results. The purpose of this research was to profile these memory systems in children with DLD and their typically developing peers. Method One hundred four 5- to 8-year-old children participated in the study. Fifty had DLD, and 54 were typically developing. Aspects of the working memory system (verbal short-term memory, verbal working memory, and visual–spatial short-term memory) were assessed using a nonword repetition test and subtests from the Working Memory Test Battery for Children. Verbal and visual–spatial declarative memory were measured using the Children's Memory Scale, and an audiovisual serial reaction time task was used to evaluate procedural memory. Results The children with DLD demonstrated significant impairments in verbal short-term and working memory, visual–spatial short-term memory, verbal declarative memory, and procedural memory. However, verbal declarative memory and procedural memory were no longer impaired after controlling for working memory and nonverbal IQ. Declarative memory for visual–spatial information was unimpaired. Conclusions These findings indicate that children with DLD have deficits in the working memory system. While verbal declarative memory and procedural memory also appear to be impaired, these deficits could largely be accounted for by working memory skills. The results have implications for our understanding of the cognitive processes underlying language impairment in the DLD population; however, further investigation of the relationships between the memory systems is required using tasks that measure learning over long-term intervals. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.13250180


2021 ◽  
pp. 174702182110105
Author(s):  
Spencer Talbot ◽  
Todor Gerdjikov ◽  
Carlo De Lillo

Assessing variations in cognitive function between humans and animals is vital for understanding the idiosyncrasies of human cognition and for refining animal models of human brain function and disease. We determined memory functions deployed by mice and humans to support foraging with a search task acting as a test battery. Mice searched for food from the top of poles within an open-arena. Poles were divided into groups based on visual cues and baited according to different schedules. White and black poles were baited in alternate trials. Striped poles were never baited. The requirement of the task was to find all baits in each trial. Mice’s foraging efficiency, defined as the number of poles visited before all baits were retrieved, improved with practice. Mice learnt to avoid visiting un-baited poles across trials (Long-term memory) and revisits to poles within each trial (Working memory). Humans tested with a virtual-reality version of the task outperformed mice in foraging efficiency, working memory and exploitation of the temporal pattern of rewards across trials. Moreover, humans, but not mice, reduced the number of possible movement sequences used to search the set of poles. For these measures interspecies differences were maintained throughout three weeks of testing. By contrast, long-term-memory for never-rewarded poles was similar in mice and humans after the first week of testing. These results indicate that human cognitive functions relying upon archaic brain structures may be adequately modelled in mice. Conversely, modelling in mice fluid skills likely to have developed specifically in primates, requires caution.


2021 ◽  
pp. 174702182110267
Author(s):  
Roberto Filippi ◽  
Andrea Ceccolini ◽  
Peter Bright

The development of verbal fluency is associated with the maturation of executive function skills, such as the ability to inhibit irrelevant information, shift between tasks and hold information in working memory. Some evidence suggests that multilinguistic upbringing may underpin disadvantages in verbal fluency and lexical retrieval, but can also afford executive function advantages beyond the language system including possible beneficial effects in older age. This study examined the relationship between verbal fluency and executive function in 324 individuals across the lifespan by assessing the developmental trajectories of English monolingual and multilingual children aged 7 to 15 years (N=154) and adults from 18 to 80 years old (N=170). The childhood data indicated patterns of improvement in verbal fluency and executive function skills as a function of age. Multilingual and monolingual children had comparable developmental trajectories in all linguistic and non-linguistic measures used in the study with the exception of planning, for which monolingual children showed a steeper improvement over the studied age range relative to multilingual children. For adults, monolinguals and multilingual participants had comparable performance on all measures with the exception of non-verbal inhibitory control and response times on the Tower of London task: monolinguals showed a steeper decline associated with age. Exploratory factor analysis indicated that verbal fluency was associated with working memory and fluid intelligence in monolingual participants but not in multilinguals. These findings raise the possibility that early acquisition of an additional language may impact on the development of the functional architecture serving high-level human cognition.


1998 ◽  
Vol 353 (1377) ◽  
pp. 1819-1828 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
S. M. Courtney ◽  
L. Petit ◽  
J. V. Haxby ◽  
L. G. Ungerleider

Working memory enables us to hold in our ‘mind's eye’ the contents of our conscious awareness, even in the absence of sensory input, by maintaining an active representation of information for a brief period of time. In this review we consider the functional organization of the prefrontal cortex and its role in this cognitive process. First, we present evidence from brain–imaging studies that prefrontal cortex shows sustained activity during the delay period of visual working memory tasks, indicating that this cortex maintains on–line representations of stimuli after they are removed from view. We then present evidence for domain specificity within frontal cortex based on the type of information, with object working memory mediated by more ventral frontal regions and spatial working memory mediated by more dorsal frontal regions. We also propose that a second dimension for domain specificity within prefrontal cortex might exist for object working memory on the basis of the type of representation, with analytic representations maintained preferentially in the left hemisphere and image–based representations maintained preferentially in the right hemisphere. Furthermore, we discuss the possibility that there are prefrontal areas brought into play during the monitoring and manipulation of information in working memory in addition to those engaged during the maintenance of this information. Finally, we consider the relationship of prefrontal areas important for working memory, both to posterior visual processing areas and to prefrontal areas associated with long–term memory.


Author(s):  
Marius Wolf ◽  
Sergey Solovyev ◽  
Fatemi Arshia

In this paper, analytical equations for the central film thickness in slender elliptic contacts are investigated. A comparison of state-of-the-art formulas with simulation results of a multilevel elastohydrodynamic lubrication solver is conducted and shows considerable deviation. Therefore, a new film thickness formula for slender elliptic contacts with variable ellipticity is derived. It incorporates asymptotic solutions, which results in validity over a large parameter domain. It captures the behaviour of increasing film thickness with increasing load for specific very slender contacts. The new formula proves to be significantly more accurate than current equations. Experimental studies and discussions on minimum film thickness will be presented in a subsequent publication.


2001 ◽  
Vol 86 (4) ◽  
pp. 2041-2053 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toshiyuki Sawaguchi ◽  
Michiyo Iba

In primates, dorsolateral areas of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) play a major role in visuospatial working memory. To examine the functional organization of the PFC for representing visuospatial working memory, we produced reversible local inactivation, with the local injection of muscimol (5 μg, 1 μl), at various sites ( n = 100) in the dorsolateral PFC of monkeys and observed the behavioral consequences in an oculomotor delayed-response task that required memory-guided saccades for locations throughout both visual fields. At 82 sites, the local injection of muscimol induced deficits in memory-guided saccades to a few specific, usually contralateral, target locations that varied with the location of the injection site. Such deficits depended on the delay length, and longer delays were associated with larger deficits in memory-guided saccades. The injection sites and affected spatial locations of the target showed a gross topographical relationship. No deficits appeared for a control task in which the subject was required to make a visually guided saccade to a visible target. These findings suggest that a specific site in the dorsolateral PFC is responsible for the working memory process for a specific visuospatial coordinate to guide goal-directed behavior. Further, memoranda for specific visuospatial coordinates appear to be represented in a topographical memory mapwithin the dorsolateral PFC to represent visuospatial working memory processes.


2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (8) ◽  
pp. 1633-1647 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Deen ◽  
Rebecca Saxe ◽  
Marina Bedny

In congenital blindness, the occipital cortex responds to a range of nonvisual inputs, including tactile, auditory, and linguistic stimuli. Are these changes in functional responses to stimuli accompanied by altered interactions with nonvisual functional networks? To answer this question, we introduce a data-driven method that searches across cortex for functional connectivity differences across groups. Replicating prior work, we find increased fronto-occipital functional connectivity in congenitally blind relative to blindfolded sighted participants. We demonstrate that this heightened connectivity extends over most of occipital cortex but is specific to a subset of regions in the inferior, dorsal, and medial frontal lobe. To assess the functional profile of these frontal areas, we used an n-back working memory task and a sentence comprehension task. We find that, among prefrontal areas with overconnectivity to occipital cortex, one left inferior frontal region responds to language over music. By contrast, the majority of these regions responded to working memory load but not language. These results suggest that in blindness occipital cortex interacts more with working memory systems and raise new questions about the function and mechanism of occipital plasticity.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleš Oblak ◽  
Anka Slana Ozimič ◽  
Grega Repovš ◽  
Urban Kordeš

In experimental cognitive psychology, objects of inquiry have typically been operationalized with psychological tasks. If we are interested in measuring the target phenomena, we must inquire into the validity of the task; that is, to what extent does the task elicit the phenomenon in question. If we subscribe to the second view, evaluating the validity and the interpretation of the gathered data can be supplemented by understanding the experience of solving psychological tasks. The aim of the present article is to investigate how individuals experience performing a psychological task, specifically, a visuo-spatial working memory task. We present ethnographic descriptions of different ways individuals can experience the same task. We focus on aspects of experience that comprise the overall sense of experience (e.g., bodily feelings, emotional atmosphere, mood). We discuss the methodological implications of our findings and the possibility of conducting a neurophenomenology of visuo-spatial working memory.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 37-40
Author(s):  
A.D. Shkodina ◽  
R.M. Hrinko ◽  
I.I. Starchenko

The interaction between a body and an environment provides the main aspects of human life. The study of the functional structure of the olfactory analyzer plays an important role both in clinical and in experimental studies, but the question of its features in humans needs detailed research. The paper presents the modern data of the structural and functional organization of the olfactory analyzer. Particular attention is paid to the structural organization of olfactory bulbs as most complicated and least studied component of the olfactory analyzer. The morphological and functional changes of the olfactory analyzer are developing in some diseases and in action of adverse environmental factors are described while the accentuation is placed on the differences of the mechanism in the pathogenesis of damage to the olfactory analyzer, depending on the nature of the influence of pathogenic factors. In this way as the result of short-term intense effects of the pollutant, irreversible atrophic changes are primarily affected to the olfactory epithelium, thus, to some extent, preventing the spread of the toxin to other analyzer structures. Conversely, a long-term exposure to low doses usually retains the functional activity of the olfactory epithelium, while harmful substances penetrate the central unit of the olfactory analyzer. In such cases, the olfactory dysfunction can be diagnosed after a long time after the start of the cohort with certain pollutants. Currently, studies of the influence of exogenous toxins on various parts of the olfactory analyzer on animal experimental models are quite active. At the same time, the issue of functional and morphological changes in various structural components of the human olfactory analyzer under the influence of negative environmental factors remains poorly understood and requires further morphological and biochemical studies, in order to be able to further develop effective therapeutic and prophylactic means.


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