Stress and cortisol are known to impair memory retrieval of well-consolidated declarative material. The effects of cortisol on memory retrieval may in particular be due to glucocorticoid (GC) receptors in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex (PFC). Therefore, effects of stress and cortisol should be observable on both hippocampal-dependent declarative memory retrieval and PFC-dependent working...

BACKGROUND Using the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC) Conant et al. (1999) observed that visual and auditory working memory (WM) span were independent in both younger and older children from DR Congo, but related in older American children and in Lao children. The present study evaluated whether visual and auditory WM span were independent in Ugandan and Senegalese children. ME...

The inter-related cognitive constructs of working memory (WM) and processing speed are fundamental components to general intellectual functioning in humans. Importantly, both WM and processing speed are highly susceptible to disruption in cases of brain injury, neurologic illness, and even in normal aging. A goal of this article is to summarize and critique the functional imaging studies of spe...

Recent studies have shown that working memory (WM) performance can be improved by intensive and adaptive computerized training. Here, we explored the WM training effect using Electroencephalography (EEG) neurofeedback (NF) in normal young adults. In the first study, we identified the EEG features related to WM in normal young adults. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve showed that...

ecently a growing body of literature has shown that individuals affected by fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) show deficits in executive function (EF). 1,2 Executive function is a broad term used to describe a wide range of cognitive processes based in the frontal lobe involving deliberate actions such as planning, strategizing, inhibition, set-shifting, flexible thinking, and most critica...

It has recently been suggested that speakers vary in the amount of speech planning and that the scope of planning is influenced by taskand speaker specific constraints. To test this, an experiment is presented examining the effects of linguistic structure and working memory on speech planning, as evidenced in pause duration and F0 peaks. Twenty speakers of German performed two tasks. In the fir...

Fluid reasoning shares a large part of its variance with working memory capacity (WMC). The literature on working memory (WM) suggests that the capacity of the focus of attention responsible for simultaneous maintenance and integration of information within WM, as well as the effectiveness of executive control exerted over WM, determines individual variation in both WMC and reasoning. In 6 expe...

Performance on working memory (WM) tasks may partially be supported by long-term memory (LTM) processing. Hence, brain activation recently being implicated in WM may actually have been driven by (incidental) LTM formation. We examined which brain regions actually support successful WM processing, rather than being confounded by LTM processes, during the maintenance and probe phase of a WM task....

All previously published papers were reproduced with permission from the publisher. ABSTRACT Working memory: Development, Disorders and Training Working memory (WM) is the ability to keep information online during a short period of time. Brain regions underlying WM functioning are found in the frontal and parietal cortices. It is largely unknown to what extent the neural substrates underlying W...

This 3-year longitudinal study determined whether (a) subgroups of children with reading disabilities (RD) (children with RD only, children with both reading and arithmetic deficits, and low verbal IQ readers) and skilled readers varied in working memory (WM) and short-term memory (STM) growth and (b) whether growth in an executive system and/or a phonological storage system mediated growth in ...