Showing papers by "Alan D. Baddeley published in 1991"
TL;DR: There was no interaction between task difficulty as measured by number of alternatives and rate of deterioration, suggesting that the progressive deterioration in performance shown by AD patients is a function of whether single or dual task performance is required, and is not dependent on simple level of task difficulty.
Abstract: A previous study (Baddeley et al., 1986) explored the hypothesis that patients suffering from dementia of the Alzheimer type (AD) are particularly impaired in the functioning of the central executive component of working memory. It showed that, when patients are required to perform 2 concurrent tasks simultaneously, the AD patients are particularly impaired, even when level of performance on the individual tasks is equated with that of age-matched controls. Although the results were clear, interpretation was still complicated by 2 issues: first, the question of comparability of performance on the separate tests between AD and control patients; secondly, the question of whether our results could be interpreted simply in terms of a limited general processing capacity being more taxed by more difficult dual tasks than by the individual tasks performed alone. The present study followed up the AD and control patients after 6 and 12 mths. We were able to allow for the problem of comparability of performance by using patients as their own control. Under these conditions, there is a very clear tendency for dual task performance to deteriorate while single task performance is maintained. A second experiment varied difficulty within a single task in which patients and controls were required to categorize words as belonging to 1, 2 or 4 semantic categories. There was a clear effect of number of categories on performance and a systematic decline in performance over time. There was, however, no interaction between task difficulty as measured by number of alternatives and rate of deterioration, suggesting that the progressive deterioration in performance shown by AD patients is a function of whether single or dual task performance is required, and is not dependent on simple level of task difficulty. Implications for the analysis of the central executive component of working memory are discussed.
651 citations
TL;DR: The authors used articulatory suppression to explore the role of the phonological loop system of working memory in the acquisition by adults of foreign language vocabulary, and found that articulation suppression disrupts the learning of Russian vocabulary, but not native language paired associates, by Italian subjects.
393 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the role of phonological memory and linguistic factors in nonword repetition in 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds was investigated. And the authors found that repetition accuracy in four-, five-, and six-year old children was sensitive to two independent factors: a phonologically memory factor, nonword length, and a linguistic factor, wordlikeness.
Abstract: It has recently been suggested that the developmental association between nonword repetition performance and vocabulary knowledge reflects the contribution of phonological memory processes to vocabulary acquisition (e.g., Gathercole & Baddeley, 1989). An alternative account of the association is that the child uses existing vocabulary knowledge to support memory for nonwords. The present article tests between these two alternative accounts by evaluating the role of phonological memory and linguistic factors in nonword repetition. In a longitudinal database, repetition accuracy in 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds was found to be sensitive to two independent factors: a phonological memory factor, nonword length, and a linguistic factor, wordlikeness. To explain these combined influences, it is suggested that repeating nonwords involves temporary phonological memory storage which may be supported by either a specific lexical analogy or by an appropriate abstract phonological frame generated from structurally similar vocabulary items.
317 citations
TL;DR: A study of 4-and 5-year-old children investigated whether measures of phonological memory and rhyme awareness reflect a common phonological processing skill or differentiable phonological abilities as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: A study of 4-and 5-year-old children investigated whether measures of phonological memory and rhyme awareness reflect a common phonological processing skill or differentiable phonological abilities. Tests of phonological memory, rhyme oddity detection, reading, vocabulary and non-verbal intelligence were given to the children in each age group. Factor analyses performed on the measures showed that phonological memory and rhyme awareness measures did indeed share a common phonological processing component, but other analyses established that the two types of phonological processing task were nonetheless differentially linked with reading and vocabulary development. The two phonological memory measures taken in the study–non-word repetition and digit span–were significantly related to vocabulary knowledge in both the ages 4 and 5 groups, and to reading achievement at age 5, but not age 4. These findings replicate and extend our earlier findings. In contrast, rhyme awareness scores were not significantly associated with vocabulary knowledge at either age, but were strongly related to scores on one of the reading tests, a multiple-choice measure, at both ages 4 and 5. The pattern of findings indicates that, although there appears to be a common phonological processing component underpinning phonological memory and phonological awareness tasks, the tasks also reflect separate cognitive skills which make differential contributions to reading and vocabulary development.
268 citations
TL;DR: It is concluded that AD can give rise to relatively specific cognitive deficits during its early stages, but that these do not necessarily argue for Becker's two-component interpretation of the cognitive deficit in Alzheimer's disease.
Abstract: Becker (1988) has argued that Alzheimer's disease is particularly characterised by a combination of amnesic and dysexecutive deficits He has supported this hypothesis by identifying patients who represent a relatively pure example of each of these We describe a search for similarly pure patients in a sample of 55 carefully selected Alzheimer cases We succeed in identifying one case each of relatively pure amnesia and relatively pure dysexecutive syndrome We also, however, find cases of predominant STM deficit, as well as cases with defective visual but not verbal memory, and cases of the converse pattern These cases do not seem to reflect simple random variation in the data, since less theoretically coherent patterns of symptoms are not found in this pure form We conclude that AD can give rise to relatively specific cognitive deficits during its early stages, but that these do not necessarily argue for Becker's two-component interpretation of the cognitive deficit in Alzheimer's disease
96 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the long-term retention of parking locations was studied in a group of members of the Applied Psychology Unit (MU) subject panel, who were asked to recall where they had parked during the morning and afternoon of each of the previous 12 working days.
Abstract: Three experiments studied the long-term retention of parking locations. In Experiment 1, members of the Applied Psychology Unit (MU) attempted to recall where they had parked during the morning and afternoon of each of the previous 12 working days. A marked recency effect was observed. In Experiment 2, members of the APU Subject Panel were invited for a single test session, and asked where they had parked after a delay of 2 hours, 1 week or 1 month. Recall was excellent and did not differ as a function of delay, allowing a simple trace decay interpretation to be ruled out. A third experiment invited subjects to attend on two occasions separated by a 2-week interval. The subjects were then required to recall their parking locations some 4 weeks after either their first visit or their second visit. Performance in both groups was inferior to that observed in Experiment 2, and declined over time. A temporal discrimination model, based on laboratory studies of both long-term and short-term recency in ...
63 citations
TL;DR: For instance, the authors investigated the relationship between nonword repetition abilities and vocabulary acquisition in young children and found that vocabulary size is associated with a range of abilities, including general intelligence scores, reading ability, reading comprehension, and school success.
Abstract: The opportunity taken by Snowling, Chiat, and Hulme to step into the debate concerning the nature of the relationship between nonword repetition abilities and vocabulary acquisition in young children should be welcomed. Vocabulary size is strongly associated with a range of abilities, including general intelligence scores, reading ability, reading comprehension, and school success (e.g., Anderson & Freebody, 1981) and as a consequence, vocabulary knowledge provides the major index of verbal intelligence in many standardized ability tests used with both children and adults. Given the weight attached by psychologists to vocabulary knowledge, it seems surprising that until recently the cognitive processes underpinning word learning had been largely neglected. Any progress in understanding the psychological constraints in vocabulary development, whether it takes the form of informed theoretical debate or further empirical work, should therefore be encouraged.
31 citations
TL;DR: Findings dissociate long and short-term recency phenomena, which would reflect the operation of different memory components, and a collateral finding was PV's difficulty in anagram solving, which may be traced back to the defective function of her phonological short- term store.
29 citations
31 Oct 1991
TL;DR: The results begin to clarify the role of executive control in the organization of behavior, with findings that executive deficits following frontal lesions are specifically associated with losses in fluid intelligence.
Abstract: : A distinction between voluntary/controlled and stimulus-driven/ automatic behavior has been separately applied to the effects of frontal lobe lesions, individual differences in general intelligence or Spearman's g, and interference between dissimilar, concurrent tasks We suggest that these three problems are indeed closely linked, all concerning a process of selection between alternative goals or abstract requirements on behavior, especially under conditions of novelty and /or weak environmental cues to action Among our findings are: (1) Executive deficits following frontal lesions are specifically associated with losses in fluid intelligence (2) Conventional frontal tests have little in common besides g (3) Across a wide range of spatial and verbal tasks, dual task interference is closely related to both g correlations and frontal lobe involvement This may only be true, however, when the secondary task is random sequence generation, designed to avoid stereotype (4) Frontal patients and people from the lower part of the g distribution share a tendency to goal neglect, or disregard of a task requirement even though that requirement has been understood Neglect is confined to novel behavior, eliminated by verbal prompts, and sensitive to the number of concurrent goals (5) In speeded stimulus classification, switching classification rules produces high g correlations Correlations rapidly decrease, however, with practice on a fixed rule The results begin to clarify the role of executive control in the organization of behavior Working memory, Central executive, Frontal lobes, Intelligence
3 citations