The brain can hold information about multiple objects in working memory. It is not known, however, whether intervals of time can be stored in memory as distinct items. Here, we developed a novel paradigm to examine temporal memory where listeners were required to reproduce the duration of a single probed interval from a sequence of intervals. We demonstrate that memory performance significantly...

Cognitive effort leads to a seeming cacophony of brain oscillations. For example, during tasks engaging working memory (WM), specific oscillatory frequency bands modulate in space and time. Despite ample data correlating such modulation to task performance, a mechanistic explanation remains elusive. We propose that flexible control of neural oscillations provides a unified mechanism for the rap...

We previously reported better performance on the Day-Night task when a ditty was chanted between stimulus presentation and when children could respond (Diamond, Kirkham, & Amso, 2002). Here we investigated competing hypotheses about why the ditty helps. Does it help because it imposes a brief waiting time (the child waits while the ditty is chanted before responding)? Or, does the ditty help be...

This series of three event-related potential experiments explored the issue of whether the underlying mechanism of working memory (WM) supporting language processing is inhibitory or activational in nature. These different cognitive mechanisms have been proposed to explain the more efficient processing of subjects with a high WM span compared to those with a low WM span. Participants with high ...

Working memory skills have been shown to be enhanced by adaptive training in several randomised controlled trials. Here, two field trials were conducted in which teachers administered working memory training to their own pupils in school. Twenty-two children aged 8-9 years participated in Trial 1. In Trial 2, 50 children aged 9-11 years with the lowest academic performance completed training. T...

There is accumulating evidence that training working memory (WM) leads to beneficial effects in tasks that were not trained, but the mechanisms underlying this transfer remain elusive. Brain imaging can be a valuable method to gain insights into such mechanisms. Here, we discuss the impact of cognitive training on neural correlates with an emphasis on studies that implemented a WM intervention....

Two experiments investigated the effects of strategy knowledge and strategy training on the working memory (WM) performance in children (ages 10-11) with and without reading disabilities (RD). Experiment 1 examined the relationship between strategy knowledge (stability of strategy choices) and WM performance as a function of initial, gain (cued), and maintenance conditions. WM performance was s...

The role of working memory (WM) in sentence comprehension has received considerable interest, but little work has investigated how sentence production relies on memory mechanisms. Three experiments investigated speakers' tendency to produce syntactic structures that allow for early production of material that is accessible in memory. In Experiment 1, speakers produced accessible information ear...

The relationship between implicit/incidental sequence learning and working memory motivated a series of research because it is plausible that higher working memory capacity opens a "larger window" to a sequence, allowing thereby the sequence learning process to be easier. Although the majority of studies found no relationship between implicit sequence learning and working memory capacity, in th...

Several lines of evidence suggest that the striatum has an important role in spatial working memory. The neural dynamics in the striatum have been described in tasks with short delay periods (1-4 s), but remain largely uncharacterized for tasks with longer delay periods. We collected and analyzed single unit recordings from the dorsomedial striatum of rats performing a spatial working memory ta...