Abstract
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.
Highlights
Episodic buffer is a limited-capacity system that provides short-term storage of information formed in a multimodal mode, which can bind information from the subsystems of working memory and from long-term memory into a unitary “episode” oriented in time and place, using executive functions [5]
This research is an attempt to examine the relation between the binding functions of working memory (WM) and the existence of vascular risk factors via a computerized test focusing on feature binding
The results showed that participants who report suffering from one or more vascular risk factors had significantly lower performance on specific subtasks of the feature binding test (FBT) in comparison to the participants who were healthy
Summary
Episodic buffer is a limited-capacity system that provides short-term storage of information formed in a multimodal mode, which can bind information from the subsystems of working memory and from long-term memory into a unitary “episode” oriented in time and place, using executive functions [5]. In this study, we decided to focus on feature binding, as it depends, mainly, on the most complex system in WM (visual WM), and it seems to relate to the function of EB in general [17] It provides us with important information about the role of attention processes in WM [21,22], and it is more useful for our purposes. Brain Sci. 2021, 11, 1140 role in encoding and maintaining bound representations in WM, but into account of CE They concluded that there are two forms of attention in visual binding, the internal (executive) and the external (perceptual) considering the different storage capacity, that are supplementary and contribute to the feature binding [22]
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