Errors In Short-term Memory Research Articles

Demands on perceptual and mnemonic fidelity are a key determinant of age-related cognitive decline throughout the lifespan.

Aging results in less detailed memories, reflecting reduced fidelity of remembered compared to real-world representations. We tested whether poorer representational fidelity across perception, short-term memory (STM), and long-term memory (LTM) are among the earliest signs of cognitive aging. Our paradigm probed target-lure object mnemonic discrimination and precision of object-location binding. Across the lifespan, cognitive deficits were observed in midlife when detailed stimulus representations were required for perceptual and short/long-term forced choice mnemonic discrimination. A continuous metric of object-location source memory combined with computational modeling demonstrated that errors in STM and LTM in middle-aged adults were largely driven by a loss of precision for retrieved memories, not necessarily by forgetting. On a trial-by-trial basis, fidelity of item and spatial information was more tightly bound in LTM compared to STM with this association being unaffected by age. Standard neuropsychological tests without demands on memory quality (digit span, verbal learning) were less sensitive to age effects than STM and LTM precision. Perceptual discrimination predicted mnemonic discrimination. Neuropsychological proxies for prefrontal executive functions correlated with STM, but not LTM fidelity. Conversely, neuropsychological indicators of hippocampal integrity correlated with mnemonic discrimination and precision of both STM and LTM, suggesting partially dissociable mechanisms of interindividual variability in STM and LTM fidelity. These findings suggest that reduced representational fidelity is a hallmark of cognitive aging across perception, STM, and LTM and can be observed from midlife onward. Continuous memory precision tasks may be promising for the early detection of subtle age-related cognitive decline. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

14 A Potential Behavioral Sign for Detection of Mild HIV-Related Neuropsychological Impairment

Objective:Even though the severity of HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders (HAND) has decreased with the introduction of combination antiretroviral therapy, mild forms of HAND remain prevalent. Many HIV-infected individuals live alone, so mild cognitive impairments are easily missed. It is important to check their neurocognitive and everyday functions during hospital visits; however, it is challenging for Japanese clinicians because many hospitals do not have enough clinical psychologists or neuropsychologists. Additionally, neuropsychological (NP) test results may not detect those mild cognitive impairments. A micro error has been given more attention as a new behavioral sign of the early stages of cognitive decline, especially among people with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). The current study aimed to 1) develop a touch-panel HAND screening battery and 2) evaluate if the micro errors could differentiate individuals with HAND from their counterpart healthy individuals.Participants and Methods:Forty HIV-infected men (age: 49.0±8.51 years old, education: 18.5±2.17 years) and 44 healthy men (age: 45.4±8.49 years old, education: 14.4±2.27 years) completed the touch-panel HAND screening battery which assessed six NP domains by seven subtests, everyday functions, and depression. A micro error is defined as a subtle action disruption or hesitation occurring immediately before making final actions. We evaluated the micro errors in short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM) of verbal learning tests (VLT).Results:Mann Whitney U tests revealed that the HIV+ group made significantly more micro errors on both STM (HIV+: 1.45±0.90 times, Healthy: 0.52±0.84 times) and LTM (HIV+: 1.85±0.73 times, Healthy: 1.29±0.71 times) than the healthy group (STM: W=1362, p< .001, Effect Size (EF)= .548; LTM: W=1199.5, p= .002, EF= .363). An independent samples T-test showed that the HAND group made significantly more micro errors than the non-HAND group (t=1.822, p= .038, ES= .595) on STM; moreover, the Asymptomatic Neurocognitive Impairment (ANI) group made significantly more micro errors than the healthy group (W=446, p< .001, ES= .689). On LTM, no significant micro error differences between HAND and non-HAND (W=184.5, p= .539, ES= -.189) nor between ANI and healthy group (W=327.5, p= .103, ES= .241) were found.Conclusions:The present study suggests that a novel behavioral measure, micro errors, may be able to help detect even the mildest form of HAND, ANI. Given that the touch-panel HAND screening battery consists of NP and IADL tests, it is important to evaluate micro errors on these various measures. Additionally, the touch-panel screening battery requires minimal administrative staff involvement, which could be beneficial for busy HIV clinicians.

EEG-based neural networks approaches for fatigue and drowsiness detection: A survey

Drowsiness is a state of fatigue or sleepiness characterized by a strong urge to sleep. It is correlated with a progressive decline in response time, compromised processing of available information, more errors in short-term memory, and reduced vigilance behaviors. The electroencephalogram (EEG), a recording of the brain’s electrical activities, has demonstrated the most robust association with drowsiness. As a result, EEG is widely recognized as a dependable indicator for evaluating drowsiness, fatigue, and performance levels. In this survey paper, we thoroughly investigate the application of shallow and deep neural network approaches utilizing EEG signals for the detection of fatigue and drowsiness. As far as our knowledge extends, this is the pioneering survey paper dedicated to exploring this specific research domain. The paper presents a comprehensive overview of the diverse EEG features utilized in the detection of fatigue and drowsiness, the different types of neural networks, and the reported performance of these methods in the literature. Additionally, the paper thoroughly examines the challenges and limitations associated with EEG-based fatigue and drowsiness detection and highlights directions for future research. The survey aims to offer a comprehensive overview of the existing methods in EEG-based fatigue and drowsiness detection, serving as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners working in the respective field.

Visual short-term memory binding deficit in familial Alzheimer's disease

Long-term episodic memory deficits in Alzheimer's disease (AD) are well characterised but, until recently, short-term memory (STM) function has attracted far less attention. We employed a recently-developed, delayed reproduction task which requires participants to reproduce precisely the remembered location of items they had seen only seconds previously. This paradigm provides not only a continuous measure of localization error in memory, but also an index of relational binding by determining the frequency with which an object is misplaced to the location of one of the other items held in memory. Such binding errors in STM have previously been found on this task to be sensitive to medial temporal lobe (MTL) damage in focal lesion cases. Twenty individuals with pathological mutations in presenilin 1 or amyloid precursor protein genes for familial Alzheimer's disease (FAD) were tested together with 62 healthy controls. Participants were assessed using the delayed reproduction memory task, a standard neuropsychological battery and structural MRI.Overall, FAD mutation carriers were worse than controls for object identity as well as in gross localization memory performance. Moreover, they showed greater misbinding of object identity and location than healthy controls. Thus they would often mislocalize a correctly-identified item to the location of one of the other items held in memory. Significantly, asymptomatic gene carriers – who performed similarly to healthy controls on standard neuropsychological tests – had a specific impairment in object-location binding, despite intact memory for object identity and location. Consistent with the hypothesis that the hippocampus is critically involved in relational binding regardless of memory duration, decreased hippocampal volume across FAD participants was significantly associated with deficits in object-location binding but not with recall precision for object identity or localization. Object-location binding may therefore provide a sensitive cognitive biomarker for MTL dysfunction in a range of diseases including AD.

Retention-error patterns in complex alphanumeric serial-recall tasks

We propose a new method based on an algorithm usually dedicated to DNA sequence alignment in order to both reliably score short-term memory performance on immediate serial-recall tasks and analyse retention-error patterns. There can be considerable confusion on how performance on immediate serial list recall tasks is scored, especially when the to-be-remembered items are sampled with replacement. We discuss the utility of sequence-alignment algorithms to compare the stimuli to the participants' responses. The idea is that deletion, substitution, translocation, and insertion errors, which are typical in DNA, are also typical putative errors in short-term memory (respectively omission, confusion, permutation, and intrusion errors). We analyse four data sets in which alphanumeric lists included a few (or many) repetitions. After examining the method on two simple data sets, we show that sequence alignment offers 1) a compelling method for measuring capacity in terms of chunks when many regularities are introduced in the material (third data set) and 2) a reliable estimator of individual differences in short-term memory capacity. This study illustrates the difficulty of arriving at a good measure of short-term memory performance, and also attempts to characterise the primary factors underpinning remembering and forgetting.

Escaping the recent past: Which stimulus dimensions influence proactive interference?

Proactive interference occurs when information from the past disrupts current processing and is a major source of confusion and errors in short-term memory (STM; Wickens, Born, & Allen, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 2:440-445, 1963). The present investigation examines potential boundary conditions for interference, testing the hypothesis that potential competitors must be similar along task-relevant dimensions to influence proactive interference effects. We manipulated both the type of task being completed (Experiments 1, 2, and 3) and dimensions of similarity irrelevant to the current task (Experiments 4 and 5) to determine how the recent presentation of a probe item would affect the speed with which participants could reject that item. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 contrasted STM judgments, which require temporal information, with semantic and perceptual judgments, for which temporal information is irrelevant. In Experiments 4 and 5, task-irrelevant information (perceptual similarity) was manipulated within the recent probes task. We found that interference from past items affected STM task performance but did not affect performance in semantic or perceptual judgment tasks. Conversely, similarity along a nominally irrelevant perceptual dimension did not affect the magnitude of interference in STM tasks. Results are consistent with the view that items in STM are represented by noisy codes consisting of multiple dimensions and that interference occurs when items are similar to each other and, thus, compete along the dimensions relevant to target selection.

Impact of anxiety profiles on cognitive performance in BALB/c and 129P2 mice

It has been suggested over the decades that dysfunctional anxiety may be caused by distinct alterations in cognitive processing. To learn more about the relation between anxiety and cognitive functioning, two mouse strains that display either adaptive (BALB/c) or nonadaptive (129P2) anxiety, as reflected by their ability to habituate when repeatedly exposed to a novel environment, were tested for their cognitive performance in the modified hole board (mHB) task. In general, both strains showed successful acquisition of the task. The initially more anxious BALB/c mice revealed rapid habituation to the test setup, followed by decreased long-term and short-term memory errors across the experimental period and fast relearning after reversal of the task. By contrast, the nonadaptive 129P2 mice made more short-term memory errors and performed worse than the BALB/c animals after reversal of the test. The results confirm the proposed interaction of anxiety and cognition: In BALB/c mice, adaptive characteristics of anxiety were paralleled by more successful cognitive performance, while in 129P2 mice nonadaptive anxiety-related behaviour was accompanied by a higher level of short-term memory errors and less cognitive flexibility. Moreover, these results support our hypothesis that the nonadaptive anxiety phenotype in 129P2 mice may be the result of impaired cognitive control of emotional processes, resulting in impaired behavioural flexibility, for example in response to novelty.

Errors in short-term memory for speech: A developmental study.

Errors in short-term memory for speech: A developmental study.

Errors in short-term memory for speech: a developmental study.

In a previous study (R. Treiman & C. Danis, 1988), adults who were presented with lists of spoken consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) nonsense syllables for immediate recall produced many errors that combined the initial consonant onset of one to-be-remembered syllable with the vowel-consonant rime of another to-be-remembered syllable. These onset-rime recombination errors were more common than other types of recombination errors and also more common than serial position errors. These findings suggest that nonwords are remembered in terms of smaller phonological units. To replicate the previous results and to determine whether they generalize to children, the author tested kindergarteners, 3rd graders, 6th graders, and adults on lists of nonsense CVCs. Onset-rime conjunction errors were the most frequent type of recombination error, even among kindergarteners, suggesting that children code spoken syllables in terms of onset and rime units from a young age.

Syllabification of bisyllabic nonwords: evidence from short-term memory errors.

Do errors in short-term memory for spoken stimuli sometimes combine one syllable from one to-be-remembered item with one syllable from another to-be-remembered item? If so, can the errors shed light on how the stimuli are syllabified? We report three experiments in which college students tried to recall five-item lists containing two CVCVC (consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel-consonant) nonwords and three filler digits. When the second vowel of the nonword was stressed, recombination errors tended to blend the initial CV of one nonword with the final CVC of another, especially if the middle consonant was an obstruent. When the first vowel was stressed, the error pattern depended on the type of vowel. CV/CVC recombinations were more common for tense vowels than for lax vowels. In general, CV/CVC recombinations tended to be more frequent relative to CVC/VC recombinations when the middle consonant was an obstruent than when it was a sonorant. The findings are discussed in relation to linguistic theories of syllabification and the results of previous experiments using metalinguistic tasks.

Variability in psychometric test scores: The importance of the practice effect in patient study design

Johnson, Brian F., Kathleen Hoch and Johanna Johnson: Variability in Psychometric Test Scores: The Importance of the Practice Effect in Patient Study Design. Prog. Neuro-Psychopharmacol. & Biol. Psychiat. 1991, 15 (5): 625–635. 1. 1. Practice effect was determined for six types of psychometric tests given on eight occasions. 2. 2. No plateau occurred. Stepwise mean decrease in Choice Reaction Time, Short Term Memory Errors, and Card Sorting Time, and stepwise mean increase in Mathematical, Visual Vigilance, and Digit-Symbol Substitution scores developed progressively. 3. 3. Pre-trial training will usually fail to prevent practice effect from confounding effect of any intervention. 4. 4. Design of drug intervention studies must take account of the continuing practice effect.

Short-term memory errors for spoken syllables are affected by the linguistic structure of the syllables.

Three experiments on short-term serial memory for spoken syllables are reported. The stimuli were CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) syllables in Experiment 1, CCVs in Experiment 2, and VCCs in Experiment 3. Analyses of subjects' errors showed that the phonemes within a syllable were not equally free to break apart and recombine. Certain groups of phonemes-the vowel-final consonant group of a CVC, the initial cluster of a CCV, and a vowel-liquid group within a VCC-tended to behave as units. These results are consistent with the view that syllables are coded in terms of an onset (initial consonant or cluster) and a rime (remainder). Errors in short-term memory for spoken syllables are affected by the linguistic structure of the syllables.

Short-term memory errors for spoken syllables are affected by the linguistic structure of the syllables.

Short-term memory errors for spoken syllables are affected by the linguistic structure of the syllables.

Errors in short-term memory for good and poor readers.

This study examined the role of phonetic factors in the performance of good and poor beginning readers on a verbal short-term memory task. Good and poor readers in the second and third grades repeated four-item lists of consonant-vowel syllables in which each consonant shared zero, one, or two features with other consonants in the string. As in previous studies, the poor readers performed less accurately than the good readers. However, the nature of their errors was the same: Both groups tended to transpose initial consonants as a function of their phonetic similarity and adjacency. These findings suggest that poor readers are able to employ a phonetic coding strategy in short-term memory, as do good readers, but less skillfully.

Errors in speech and short-term memory: The effects of phonemic similarity and syllable position

Three experiments are reported which compare phonemic speech errors with phonemic order errors in short-term memory. Experiment 1 demonstrates the influence of feature similarity on consonant transpositions and also shows that consonant transpositions are more frequent than vowel transpositions which are in turn more frequent than syllable transpositions. Experiment 2 shows that similarity of the accompanying vowel affects the probability of consonant exchange, while Experiment 3 shows an effect of syllable position on consonant and vowel transpositions. These results are taken as support for the contention that phonemic speech and short-term memory errors arise at a common locus in the information-processing system.

The effects of recognition and recall instructions on short-term and long-term retention of unfamiliar visual information

The effect of temporal placement of instructions and processing demands on long- and short-term retention was studied using random visual patterns to minimize effects of verbal coding and prior learning. Long-term recognition was superior to long-term recall under the recognition but not the recall-demand condition. Errors in short-term memory perseverated across trials, and repetition enhancement of short-term recall accuracy (learning) occurred under a pre- but not a poststimulus instruction to recall, suggesting that temporal placement of recall instructions is critical to coding accuracy.

Semantic confusion errors in short-term memory

The analysis of error data in short-term memory (STM) tasks has frequently led to the conclusion that semantic information is not stored efficiently in STM. Experiment I used a probe recognition memory task requiring the recognition of either identity or synonymity. Conditions between which the opportunity for semantic confusion errors differed resulted in changes in the rate of false recognition. This evidence was viewed as supporting the hypothesis that semantic information may be stored in STM when such storage is a task demand. A second experiment explored the ability to recognize synonymity when storage in STM is not involved. The results showed less than perfect recognition, indicating that synonyms are only approximate instances of semantic identity.

Visual and auditory intrusion errors in short-term memory.

Visual and auditory intrusion errors in short-term memory.

Articulatory coding in short-term memory

Confusion errors in short-term memory for visually-presented nonsense syllables were analyzed to determine the influence of two articulatory features of consonants: voicing and place of articulation. Both were found to contribute to confusions. Results are interpreted as consistent with a hypothesis of mediation by kinesthetic cues arising from subvocal rehearsal, and inconsistent with a hypothesis of mediation by an auditory image.

Distinctive features and errors in short-term memory for English consonants.

Errors in short-term recall of 23 English consonants were tabulated and related to three distinctive-feature systems. The consonants were always presented in initial position in a consonant-vowel diagram, and the vowel was always /a/. Subjects were instructed to copy a list of consonants as it was being presented, followed by recall of the list. Perceptual errors were excluded from the recall-error matrix by scoring for recall only correctly copied consonants. The data were also analyzed in such a way as to eliminate differences in response bias for different consonants. Having controlled for response bias, each feature system makes predictions about the rank order of different intrusion errors in recall. Each of the three feature systems was significantly more accurate than chance in these predictions, but the most accurate system was one developed in the present study. This system is a slightly modified version of the conventional phonetic analysis of consonants in terms of voicing, nasality, openness of the vocal tract (manner of articulation), and place of articulation. The results suggest that a consonant is coded in short-term memory, not as a unit, but as a set of distinctive features, each of which may be forgotten at least semiindependently.