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Visuospatial bootstrapping is the name given to a phenomenon whereby performance on visually presented verbal serial-recall tasks is better when stimuli are presented in a spatial array rather than a single location. However, the display used has to be a familiar one. This phenomenon implies communication between cognitive systems involved in storing short-term memory for verbal and visual information, alongside connections to and from knowledge held in long-term memory. Bootstrapping is a robust, replicable phenomenon that should be incorporated in theories of working memory and its interaction with long-term memory. This article provides an overview of bootstrapping, contextualizes it within research on links between long-term knowledge and short-term memory, and addresses how it can help inform current working memory theory.

Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) often leads to cognitive impairments, particularly regarding working memory (WM). This meta-analysis aims to examine the impact of TBI on WM, taking into account moderating factors which has received little attention in previous research, such as severity of injury, the different domains of Baddeley's multi-component model, and the interaction between these two factors, as well as the interaction with other domains of executive functions. Following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses guidelines, a systematic review and meta-analysis searched Google Scholar, PubMed, and PsycNET for studies with objective WM measures. Multiple meta-analyses were performed to compare the effects of TBI severity on different WM components. Twenty-four English, peer-reviewed articles, mostly cross-sectional were included. TBI significantly impairs general WM and all Baddeley's model components, most notably the Central Executive ( ' = 0.74). Severity categories, mild-moderate and moderate-severe, were identified. Impairment was found across severities, with \"moderate-severe\" demonstrating the largest effect size ( = 0.81). Individuals with moderate-severe TBI showed greater impairments in the Central Executive and Episodic Buffer compared to those with mild-moderate injury, whereas no such differences were found for the Phonological Loop and Visuospatial Sketchpad. These findings enhance our understanding of WM deficits in varying severities of TBI, highlighting the importance of assessing and treating WM in clinical practice and intervention planning.

Memory and language are the two higher-order cognitive abilities intertwined for communication and other cognitive skills. Memory is the storage capacity of all the information we perceive. Where the sensory memory perceives the stimuli, the working memory actively stores the information and passes it to the long-term memory. However, there is a question that how is the continuous perception of stimuli transformed into meaningful information and organized for proper execution and retrieval from the memory? This paper focuses on the episodic memory that perceives information that is spatial and temporal based on our everyday experiences. Though the spatiotemporal information we receive is continuous; the episodic memory arranges the information as to episodes in the working memory before the information is stored for a longer period. The episodic buffer is one of the components of the working memory model which holds the episodic memory that is organized concerning time. To this point, the paper tries to understand the working of the episodic buffer in maintaining the episodic memory and also about the process of episodic events into meaningful units. Further, the paper also concentrates on the hippocampus which is considered to be the location of the episodic buffer.

This study investigated the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and L2 oral fluency and explored the maintenance of newly presented information in L2 speaking production. When performing speech production tasks, knowledge from long-term memory is at frequent use and hence involves the operation of the episodic buffer, one component of the working memory system, where information is retrieved from long-term memory and stored in chunks as we speak in chunks. In this study, we measured WMC by assessing chunk capacity and chunk size held in and retrieved from the episodic buffer. Chunk capacity was measured by Pair-word Speaking Task; chunk size was measured by Procedure Description Task; and oral fluency was measured by speech rate and mean length of run using an IELTS speaking task. Twenty-nine English-major students participated in this study. The results showed a strong positive correlation between chunk capacity and the two measures of fluency while chunk size negatively correlated with fluency. Data from the recall interviews revealed that participants employed various strategies for the maintenance of the presented information which involved different types of information binding.

This study explored how working memory resources contributed to reading comprehension using tasks that focused on maintenance of verbal information in the phonological store, the interaction between the central executive and the phonological store (WMI), and the storage of bound semantic content in the episodic buffer (immediate narrative memory). We analysed how performance in these tasks was related to text decoding (reading speed and accuracy), listening and reading comprehension. The participants were 62 monolingual and 36 bilingual children (mean age nine years, SD = 9 months) enrolled in the same Italian primary school. Bilingual children were born to immigrant parents and had a long history of exposure to Italian as a second language. The regression analyses showed that reading accuracy and listening comprehension were associated with reading comprehension for monolingual and bilingual children. Two working memory components—WMI and immediate narrative memory—exhibited indirect effects on reading comprehension through reading accuracy and listening comprehension, respectively. Such effects occurred only for monolingual children. We discuss the implications of such findings for text reading and comprehension in monolinguals and bilinguals.

The ability to create temporary binding representations of information from different sources in working memory has recently been found to relate to the development of monolingual word recognition in children. The current study explored this possible relationship in an adult word-learning context. We assessed whether the relationship between cross-modal working memory binding and lexical development would be observed in the learning of associations between unfamiliar spoken words and their semantic referents, and whether it would vary across experimental conditions in first- and second-language word learning. A group of English monolinguals were recruited to learn 24 spoken disyllable Mandarin Chinese words in association with either familiar or novel objects as semantic referents. They also took a working memory task in which their ability to temporarily bind auditory-verbal and visual information was measured. Participants’ performance on this task was uniquely linked to their learning and retention of words for both novel objects and for familiar objects. This suggests that, at least for spoken language, cross-modal working memory binding might play a similar role in second language-like (i.e., learning new words for familiar objects) and in more native-like situations (i.e., learning new words for novel objects). Our findings provide new evidence for the role of cross-modal working memory binding in L1 word learning and further indicate that early stages of picture-based word learning in L2 might rely on similar cognitive processes as in L1.

Previous examinations of working memory impairments in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have predominantly focused on discreet visuospatial and phonological subsystem processes, as well as the domain-general central executive. The episodic buffer component of working memory, a neurocognitive process that allows for temporary storage and maintenance of bound episodes/features of information, is understudied in ADHD and initial findings have been equivocal. Heterogeneity in previous findings may reflect between-study methodological variability, floor effects unrelated to episodic buffer processes (i.e., excessive central executive demands), and limitations associated with previous investigations’ use of novel paradigms. This study examined ADHD-related episodic buffer processing via an established paradigm (Allen et al., 2006) in well-defined groups of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and typically developing peers (TD). Seventy-one children (ADHD n = 34, TD n = 37) aged 8–12 years (M = 9.81, SD = 1.50; 32% female) completed two conditions of a computerized working memory task that presented single feature stimuli (color and shape), and a third condition that presented dual-feature stimuli (color/shape binding). Overall, the ADHD group exhibited a large-magnitude deficit during the color/shape binding condition (d = .77), and both groups evinced worse performance accuracy in the color/shape binding condition compared to the single feature color and shape conditions. Collectively, these findings appear to provide evidence that children with ADHD exhibit large magnitude episodic buffer deficits that are not attributable to visuospatial subsystem or domain-general central executive processes.

Working memory has been proposed to account for the differential rates in progress young children make in writing. One crucial aspect of learning to write is the encoding (i.e., integration) and retrieval of the correct phoneme–grapheme pairings, known as binding. In addition to executive functions, binding is regarded as central to the concept of working memory. To test the developmental increase in binding ability and its comparative influence on writing, an experimental study assessed 5- and 6-year-olds’ accuracy in retaining and retrieving bound audio-visual information alongside measures of verbal and visual complex working memory span (i.e., central executive functions), and transcription skills (i.e., alphabet and spelling). Results demonstrated an age-related increase in the ability to bind, and that binding had significant associations with working memory and early writing ability, but once binding and age were controlled for it was verbal working memory that made an independent contribution to individual differences in writing performance. Although the contribution this paper made was through an exploration and expansion of theoretical ideas within writing research, it is likely to make an important practical contribution to instruction in the future both at the level of transcription and text generation as writers develop those skills.

The present event-related fMRI study addressed the question whether retrieval-related neural activity in lateral parietal cortex is affected by the relative probability of test items. We varied the proportion of old to new items across two test blocks, with 25% of the items being old in one block and 75% being old in the other. Prior to each block, participants (N=18) completed one of two types of study judgment on each of 108 object images. They then performed a source memory test with four response options: studied in task 1, studied in task 2, old but unsure of the study task, and new. Retrieval-related activity in regions previously identified as recollection-sensitive, including the left inferior lateral parietal cortex and bilateral medial temporal cortex, was unaffected by old/new ratio. Generic retrieval success effects – retrieval-related effects common to recognized items attracting either a correct or an incorrect source judgment – were identified in several regions of left superior parietal cortex. These effects dissociated between a middle region of the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), where activity did not interact with ratio, and regions anterior and posterior to the middle IPS where activity was sensitive to old/new ratio. The findings are inconsistent with prior proposals that retrieval-related activity in and around the left middle IPS reflects the relative salience of old and new test items. Rather, they suggest that, as in the case of more inferior left parietal regions, retrieval-related activity in this region reflects processes directly linked to retrieval.

Episodic buffer (EB), a key component of working memory, seems to have a rather complicated function as part of binding processes. Recent papers on the field claim that binding processes of working memory (WM) are assisted by attention and executive functions. On the same page, vascular pathology is gaining more ground as the main underlying cause for many brain pathologies. Hypercholesterolemia, hypertension, obesity, diabetes, lack of exercise and smoking are the most common risk factors that people of all ages suffer from and constitute the main vascular risk factors responsible for a possible decline in executive functions and attention. Thus, this research is an attempt to examine the relation between the binding functions of WM and the existence of vascular risk factors via a computerized test focusing on feature binding. The study comprised adults (n = 229) with and without vascular risk factors. The main tools used were a biomarker questionnaire and a feature binding test (FBT). The results showed that participants who report suffering from one or more vascular risk factors had significantly lower performance on specific subtasks of the FBT in comparison to the participants who were healthy. This allows us to assume that there might be a positive association between feature binding and a vascular risk profile in adults, and such a test could be a useful diagnostic tool for early cognitive impairment due to incipient vascular pathology.