ADVANCES IN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

AND CHILDHOOD LANGUAGE DISORDERS

TOPICS

 MEMORY IN COMMUNICATION DISORDERS

 ATTENTION WITH TYPES AND DEVELOPMENT

SUBMITTED BY: F.REMIJIUS IMMANUEL

SUBMITTED TO: MRS.ANNE VARGHESE
SUBMITTED ON: 30/09/2020
CONTENT LIST

 MEMORY IN COMMUNICATION DISORDERS:

  INTRODUCTION
 TYPES OF MEMORY
 STAGES OF MEMORY
 NEUROANATOMY OF MEMORY
 NEUROCHEMISTRY & NEUROPHYSIOLOGY OF MEMORY
 MODELS OF MEMORY
 ASSESSMENT OF MEMORY
 TREATMENT OF MEMORY
 MEMORY DEFICITS IN VARIOUS LANGUAGE (OR)
COMMUNICATION DISORDERS
 PERCEPTIONS (VISUOSPATIAL & MOTION)
 VISUOSPATIAL WORKING MEMORY
 ROLES OF MEMORY IN SPEECH LANGUAGE PATHOLOGY

 ATTENTION WITH TYPES AND DEVELOPMENT:

 INTRODUCTION
 NEURAL CORRELATES OF ATTENTION
 TYPES OF ATTENTION
 JOINT ATTENTION
 DEVELOPMENT OF ATTENTION
 THEORIES AND MODELS OF ATTENTION
 ATTENTION IN VARIOUS LANGUAGE DISORDERS
 ROLES OF ATTENTION IN SPEECH & LANGUAGE
DEVELOPMENT

 CONCLUSIONS (MEMORY & ATTENTION)

 MEMORY IN COMMUNICATION DISORDERS:

 INTRODUCTION:

Memory gives us a past record of who we are and is essential to the individuality.
Without memory, life would be a series of meaningless encounters that have no
link to the past and no use for the future. Memory allows us the individuals to
draw on experience and use the power of prediction to decide how they will
respond to future events. Memory is the process by which we retain the knowledge
and skills for the future.

Memory is the retention of, and ability to recall, information, personal

experiences, and procedures (skills & habits). There is no universally agreed upon
the model of the mind/brain, and no universally agreed upon model of how
memory works. A good model for how the memory works must be consistent with
the subjective nature of the consciousness and with what is known from the
scientific studies (Schacrer 1996). Memories are constructions made in accordance
with present needs, desires, influences etc. Memories are often accompanied by
feelings and emotions. Memory usually involves awareness of the memory
(Schacrer 1996).

Memory, like other aspects of cognition, is not a unitary function, but rather
consists of a number of related processes that allow us to store and recall
information. Furthermore, “Memory is both distributed and localized” with a
multitude of neural structures and pathways making unique contributions to these
various memory functions. Because of the dispersed neuro-anatomic representation
of memory, brain damage often compromises memory abilities as well.

The ability of the nervous system to be influenced by the environment is the basis
of its capacity to learn and remember. Learning involves the acquisition of new
facts and knowledge about the environment, whereas remembering the entails
encoding, consolidating, storing, retrieving and reconstructing the knowledge.
There are multiple theories and constructs regarding human memory, making this
area of study both complex and controversial. There is consensus; however, the
memory is not a unitary phenomenon. That is, there are several types of memory,
and these are sub served by different brain regions and the neuro-chemical
systems.

Memory Trace: Nerve impulses travel down the axon to the gap, or synapse, where
neurotransmitter chemicals are released. These chemicals cross the synapse to the
dendrite of the other neuron. The dendrites are covered with little bumps, called
spines, which contain chemical receptor sites. As the chemical messages enter the
spines, they may spark a series of electrochemical reactions that cause the second
neuron to generate a signal or “fire”. The reaction causes more receptor sites to
form on the spines. The next time neurotransmitter cross that the particular
synapse, the spines will take in more of these chemicals and the stimulation will be
stronger, ultimately forming a new memory trace, or engram. These individual
traces associate and form the networks so that whenever one is triggered, the whole
network is strengthened, thereby consolidating the memory and making it more
easily retrievable.

Memories are not stored intact. Instead, they are stored in pieces and distributed in
sites throughout the cerebrum. For example: The shape, colour, and smell of an
orange are categorized and stored in different sets of neurons. Activating these
sites simultaneously brings together a recollection of our thoughts and experiences
involving an orange. Exactly, how this happens is still a mystery.

The areas in the brain which are responsible for memory storage are: Deep inside
the medial temporal lobe is the region of brain known as the limbic system, which
includes the hippocampus, the amygdala, the cingulate gyrus, the thalamus, the
hypothalamus, the epithalamus, the mamilary body and other organs, many other
centers in the brain which are relevance to the processing of memory.

 TYPES OF MEMORY:

There are various types of memory which we use in our daily life, some of them
are:

➢ Sensory memory
a) Iconic memory
b) Echoic memory
➢ Intermediate memory

➢ Short term memory (STM) & Working Memory (WM)

➢ Long term memory (LTM)
a) Declarative memory
✓ Episodic memory
✓ Semantic memory
b) Non-declarative memory
✓ Implicit memory
✓ Procedural memory
 ➢ Sensory memory: The duration of this type ranges from less than one
second to several seconds. It is sometimes referred to as sensory trace(s).
The traces disappear very quickly; most often we are not even aware of
them, and the capacity for this type of memory is relatively large. Initial
stage in which the sensory information is registered- storage is automatic
and pre-attentive. The information decays rapidly within a second or so for
sensory memory (Sperling 1960). This period is necessary to permit building
of the information necessary for the extraction of linguistic features and the
essential supra-segmental information identifying stress and intonation
patterns. Information from here passes on to the Short-term memory (STM).

a) Iconic memory: Neisser (1967) called the persistence of visual

impressions and their brief availability for further processing iconic
memory. Although the iconic memory does involve some storage,
recent findings suggest that it seems to be independent of higher order
processes like attention. Many researchers have found that the
incoming information is accurately represented in iconic memory but
disappears quickly if not passed on for further processing. Sperling
(1960) suspected that asking the subjects to report as many items as
they could remember, is actually a test of what subjects remember of
what they saw, which may be different from what they initially
perceived. The icon or visual impression may contain more that we
can remember. Sperling developed a partial report technique in which
for 50 milliseconds a subject was presented with many of letters such
as:
RGC

LXN

SBJ

If the subjects try to recall as much as they can of the 9 letters presented, the
chances are they will recall 4 or 5. Immediately following the display of each row
of letters, however, Sperling presented 1 of 3 tones a high, medium, or low pitched
tone. (Eg: RGC may be cued by a high tone, LXN by a medium tone….). The
tones served to cue the subject to recall the first, second and third row of letters
respectively. The result was that each line was recalled nearly 100% of the time.

Since the subject did not know in advance which of the 3 rows would be cued for
recall, we can infer that all the 9 letters were equally available for recall; therefore,
the sensory store must hold at least 9 items. Another feature of the experiment was
that it varied the time between the display of the letters and the presentation of the
tone making that it possible to gauge the length of iconic storage. If the tone was
delayed for more than 1 second, recall dropped to the level expected in full report
examinations. The effect on recall indicated that the duration of the icon is about
250 milliseconds (1/4 of a second).

b) Echoic memory: Neisser (1967) called the sensory memory for

audition echoic memory. Echoic storage is similar to iconic storage as
the raw sensory information is held in the storage in true fidelity (in
order that the pertinent features can be extracted and analyzed) for a
short time. It allows us the additional time to hear an auditory
message. Storage time in echoic storage is very short (10-30 seconds).
Auditory information is held accurately in both systems, but probably
less faithfully in STM. Both have limited capacity while providing us
with necessary contextual cues for understanding. An analogy to
Sperling, the partial report technique is found in an experiment by
Darwin, Turvey & Crowder (1972). Through the stereophonic
headphones, the subjects were presented a matrix of auditory
information consisting of 3 triplets of mixed random digits and letters.
What the subject heard was 3 short lists of 3 items each, such as:

Left ear Both ears Right ear

B 8 F

2 6 R

L U 10

The time for presentation of all the items was 1 second. Thus, a subject would hear
simultaneously, B and 8 in the left ear, F and 8 in the right ear. The subjective
experience is that the right and the left ear messages can be localized as emanating
from their source, and the middle message appears to come from inside the head.
Recall was measured by the means of whole report or partial report techniques. A
visual cue was projected into the left, middle or right portion of a screen in front of
the subjects. Delaying the cue made it possible to trace the decay of memory. The
visual recall cue was delayed by 0, 1, 2, and 4 seconds. Echoic storage lasts up to 4
seconds but is the most vivid during the 1st second after the auditory stimulation.

Role of sensory memory:-

The iconic sensory memory stores hold the information momentarily so further
processing of pertinent items can take place. These allow us the opportunity to
extract only the information to be subjected to further processing. The limitations
of the human nervous system prohibit the recording and the processing of all or
even a sizable fraction of the bits of information available from our brief sensory
store. Iconic memory may play a role in reading, where an accurate impression of
letters and words may be necessary for comprehension.

The echoic sensory memory store allows us the additional time to hear an auditory
message. In the complex process of understanding the common speech, echoic
storage is used. Auditory impulses that make up speech are spread over time.
Information contained in any small fraction of speech, music, or other sound is
meaningless unless placed within the context of other sounds. Echoic storage, by
briefly preserving the auditory information, provides us with the immediate
contextual cues for comprehension of auditory information (i.e) it allows us to hold
the auditory cues briefly in the presence of new ones so that the abstractions can be
made on the basis of the phonetic context.

➢ Intermediate memory: It occurs once the information has been processed.

It can be viewed as the part of memory which holds and mixes the
information from the different parts of memory. This will determine how
we feel and what we will do about a given situation. It defines our ability to
express actions. When we do reverse digit spans, we are working
intermediate memory.

➢ Short-term memory (STM) & working memory (WM): Short term

memory (STM) refers to the amount or bits of information we can hold in
our head at any given time and lasts between 1 second and 24 hours
 depending upon how much importance we put on the information. The short
memory area is a place where we put information briefly until we make a
decision on how to dispose of it. STM operates subconsciously and the
portion of memory tends to be where our conscious thoughts are. We should
use this type of memory for phone numbers and zip codes. When increasing
the digit span capacity, we are actually working STM.

Working memory (WM) is the second temporary memory and the place
where conscious, rather than subconscious, processing occurring. It is a place of
limited capacity where we can build, take apart, or rework ideas for the eventual
storage somewhere else. When something is in WM, it generally captures our focus
and demands our attention. WM can handle only a few things at once. This
functional capacity changes with age.

Between the receptors (which gather countless 1000s of stimuli from our
environment) and the expansive repository of information and knowledge (Long
term memory [LTM]) is short term memory (STM). STM seems to be where we
first process the stimuli coming from our environment. Its minimal storage
capacity is matched by, its limited processing capacity, and some think that there is
a constant tradeoff between storage capacity and processing capabilities.

Capacity of STM: The amount of information stored in STM is small compared

with the vast amount stored in LTM. In 1887, Jacobs read aloud a sequence of
numbers, in no particular order and asked his listeners to write down immediately
as many as they could recall. The maximum amount of numbers recalled was about
7. Using dots, beans, nonsense, syllables, numbers, words and letters, experiments
of this type have been conducted there after with the consistent results; immediate
memory seems to be limited to about 7 units.

Pre-frontal cortex-focuses attention on sensory stimuli which is coming from

external environment, then it transfers the information to hippocampus rehearsal
and repetition and memory consolidation happens and activates the phonological
loop and visuo-spatial sketch pad in the brain during working memory (WM)
process happening.

According to Baddeley, working memory (WM) is composed of a central

executive and a number of material specific slave system.
 Central executive

Phonological loop Visuo-spatial sketch pad

Central executive is the planning and coordination but does not store information.

Phonological loop helps in articulatory rehearsal mechanism (verbal WM) and

process of auditory input and it helps in language comprehension (Wernicke’s
area). It acts as a brief acoustic storage.

Visuo-spatial sketch pad from the visual input information reaches to pre-frontal
cortex to temporal lobe for spatial information (or) stores & manipulates nonverbal
spatial representation and reaches to occipital lobe for visual information storage of
memory happens (or) visual-spatial working memory (WM).

Central
executive

Visuo-spatial sketch pad Episodic

Memory Buffer Phonological
loop

Long-term memory (LTM)

Baddeley (2001) added another component, the episodic memory buffer and has
acknowledged the role of long-term memory (LTM) in the functioning of the
phonological loop and the visuo-spatial sketch pad [as shown above].

STM & chunking: That STM holds 7 units regardless of the type of data seems
paradoxical. Obviously, a string of words (eg: helium, carrot, church, money,
parrot, music, chicken, boss, and target) has greater information than a string of
letters (eg: A, T, V, K, M…..) but one would recall about 7 items in either case.

Miller offered an explanation to show how items are coded in STM. He postulated
a 3 models of memory in which 7 units of information could be held. Individual
letters represented individual pieces of information and each letter would fill a slot.
The letters that composed a word were chunked into one unit, so that each of these
words also occupied one slot in STM. Thus, the increased capacity of STM was
achieved through coding of the letter words into word units. So, even throughout
immediate memory capacity seems to be limited to 7 units of information,
chunking (or coding single units into larger units) greatly expands our capacity.

STM, LTM & chunking: The capability of STM to handle vast amounts of
information is facilitated by our ability to chunk information. However, chunking
cannot occur until some information in LTM is activated. Our extensive knowledge
can impose structure on seemingly unrelated material once a match occurs between
the incoming items and their LTM representation. The link between LTM &
chunking was nicely be illustrated in an experiment by Bower & Springston
(1970), in which were read a letter sequence and asked to recall the letters. In one
condition, the experimenters read the letters so that they formed no well-known
group (hence not in LTM); in another condition, they read the letters so that they
formed well known groups.

Eg: 1st condition: FB……IPH…….DTW…….AIB……M

2nd condition: FBI…..PHD…….TWA…….IBM

The letters read in the second condition, which were mail: readily recalled, are
clustered along the lines of abbreviations well-known to most college students. The
pause after FBI, PHD etc. allows the subjects to look it up in their mental lexicon
and thereby encode the letters in a chunk. The capacity of STM may be limited to 7
units, but the density of information in a unit can vary enormously.

Coding in STM: ➔Auditory code

➔Visual code

➔Semantic code

➔Auditory code: STM seems to operate by means of an auditory code even if the
information is detected by a non-auditory code such as a visual one. Although the
recent evidence suggests some overlap in codes, the predominant coding of
information in STM seems to be auditory.
Article: R.Conrad (1963 & 1964) found that the STM errors were made on the
basis of auditory rather than the visual characteristics. Conrad’s experiment had 2
stages. In the first, he measured the recall of errors made on a set of letters that
were visually presented; in the second, he mastered the recall of errors made by the
subjects to whom the same set of letters were read over a background of white
noise. Each set in the first stage consisted of 6 letters. Some were letters that
sounded alike, for eg: C, V; M, N; S, F. Each of the 6 letters was displayed for 0.75
seconds. The subjects were recalled the order of the items. The results indicated
that even though the letters were visually presented, the errors were made on the
basis of their sound. Eg: B was frequently recalled as P, V as P and S as X.
Although there seems to be a strong case for the acoustic nature of STM; there are
some challenging alternative theories.

➔Visual code: Some evidence suggests that the STM may also code information
by means of a visual code.

Article: Posner & his associates (Posner, 1969; Posner et al, 1969; Posner &
Keele, 1967) found that, at least pan of the time, information is coded visually in
STM. In the experiment, subjects were shown 2 letters, the 2nd to the right of and
simultaneously with, or a brief time after the first. Subjects were to indicate, by
pressing a button (reaction time could be recorded), whether the 2 letters were the
same. The 2nd letter was identical to the first in name and form (AA), or the same in
name and different in form (An), or different (AB or Ab); and it appeared
simultaneously with or 0.5, 1 or 2 seconds after the first. Reaction time in the
second condition was longer than in the first (AA). One explanation for the
difference is that the identical letters are judged on the basis of their physical (or
visual) characteristics, while the letters having the same name but different visual
characteristics are compared in terms of their verbal characteristics; the latter
process. It is hypothesized takes more time. The important conclusion is that
apparently the AA match was made at least partly on the basis of a physical (or
visual) code.

Research conducted by Maria Brandimonte & her colleagues (1992) shows that the
people use visual coding when acoustic coding has been suppressed.

In one of Brandimonte’s studies-in one condition-the control group, people saw a

series showing 6 pictures of objects, such as the ones labeled ‘original picture’.
During task 1, the series was repeated until the participants knew the pictures in
order. On task 2, the control group participants were asked to create a mental
image of each picture in the series, and to subtract a specified part from each
image. They were then told to name the resulting image. For example, suppose
they had created a mental image of the piece of candy and then they subtracted the
specified part. Notice that they should end up describing the resulting image as a
fish. Similarly, the pipe minus the specified part should be described as a bowl.
The participants in this control condition succeeded in naming of an average of
only 2. 7 items correctly; out of a maximum of 6 items. During the task1, these
participants had probably used acoustic encoding to learn the names of the stimuli;
that is, they silently rehearsed the names ‘candy’, ‘pipe’ and so on. They typically
did not create a visual code for the stimuli. As a result, they usually had no
available visual image from which they could subtract a specified part on task 2.
Without a visual image, task 2 was so challenging that they answered less than half
of the items correctly.

The participants in the experimental group performed most of the same tasks as the
control group did. There was one exception, however. While they were learning
the original list of pictures in task 1, they were instructed to repeat an irrelevant
sound (‘lalal-la….’). Notice that this repetition would block the acoustic
representation of each picture, creating verbal suppression.

The participants in the verbal suppression group performed significantly better in

task 2 than people in the control condition. In fact, they named an average of 3.8
items correctly. Because acoustic coding had been difficult, they were probably
more likely to use visual coding. As a result, on the picture subtraction task, they
had little difficulty subtracting a pan from a visual image. This study is particularly
intriguing because the participants in the experimental group were actually given
extra work: they had to recite the sound ‘la-la-la’. However, despite this extra
assignment, they actually performed better on the visual task.

➔Semantic code: Semantic codes are those that are related to meaning. An
experiment by Solso, Heck & Mearns (1987) demonstrates semantic processing in
STM. The subjects were presented the following words at the rate of 1.2 seconds
each.

SPHERE
MOON

PLANET

GLOBE

Then, the following words were presented and the subjects were asked whether or
not they were part of the originals set.

MOON

STEEL

EARTH

The subjects correctly identified MOON as previously seen and correctly rejected
STEEL, but they were frequently false alarmed by the word EARTH. They
misidentified it as a member of the original set because of the semantic relation
that EARTH has with the other members of the original set. This process takes
place in about 12 seconds, within the parameters of STM. This shows the semantic
nature of STM and the retrieval of the information from STM.

Duration of STM: Research has shown that the items can disappear from, memory
18 seconds after learning them, if rehearsal is prevented.

Marc Sebreechis & his colleagues (1989) found that when we are not making a
concentrated effort to retain material in STM, information can vanish within a few
seconds.

➢ Long-term memory (LTM): LTM involves the acquisition and the retention
of information over longer periods of time. LTM can be further subdivided
into declarative memory and non-declarative memory.

a) Declarative memory: It encompasses the acquisition, long-term

retention of knowledge, and retrieval of events, facts and concepts and
it resides in the deep unconscious and can be viewed as the
“repository” of all our knowledge. Declarative memory can be
subdivided depending on whether the memories are concerned with a
personally relevant event (i.e. episodic memory) or with impersonal
formation (i.e. semantic memory)
✓ Episodic memory: It is experience based and it is also noted as
autobiographical memory; it refers to memory for specific
events and experiences that is usually associated with time,
place and emotion (Tulving, 1984). It is enhanced by sensory
input such as sights, sounds, music, smells and their personal
past. Episodic memories are characterized by perceptual,
conceptual and affective components that are placed within an
ongoing context of personally related events. Many times,
episodic memory is triggered by emotions. A pervasive deficit
in episodic memory is dramatically exemplified in patients with
anterograde amnesia, who are unable to acquire and retrieve
any events or episodes from their personal life that have
occurred since the onset of their amnesia. Tulving (2002)
likened the capacity of remembering specific episodes to
‘mental time travel’ as if the individuals re-experience the
individual events. This type of memory is associated with the
subjects’ individual experience. For example: movie, birthday
party, love proposal, tours or trips, vocabulary learning (it all
one episode memory also called one trial learning). For this
memory, hippocampus is predominantly activated. Episodic
memory is affected in amnesic patients and patient who
underwent the medial temporal lobe region resection including
hippocampus.

✓ Semantic memory: It refers to the acquisition and the retention

of general factual information that are not referenced to a
specific learning context. Semantic memory would include
remembering the specific information such as textbooks
information, math, names, and facts and figures. Semantic
knowledge encompasses a wide range of information, including
facts about the world, the meanings of words and concepts and
the names attached to the objects and people. By virtue of its
diverse nature, not all the forms of semantic knowledge share
the same properties. Some forms of knowledge can be acquired
 after a single exposure (eg: knowledge that Madrid is the capital
of Spain) whereas the other forms maybe gradually acquired
across the multiple repetitions (eg: understanding the concept of
website). Furthermore, semantic information, when first
encountered, may vary in the extent to which it is truly novel.
For instance, semantic learning may involve new associations
between preexisting representations in memory (eg: learning
that William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet) or acquiring a new
label for information already represented in memory (eg:
foreign language learning). The counterpart to episodic memory
is semantic memory, which is defined as the recollection of
facts and generalized knowledge about the world (Squire, 1992;
Tulving, 1983). Semantic memory reflects the information that
remains after the details of the learning experience has been
lost. This memory also affects in amnesia patients. System
consolidation refers to the process by which the memories
transferred from hippocampus to the areas of cortex as part of
the long-term retention (McClelland, McNaughton & O Reilly
1995). Based on this mechanism, most declarative memories
are acquired through episodic learning but become
semanticized over time.

b) Non-declarative memory: It refers to a variety of memory in which

learning is expressed as enhanced performance. There are 2 types:
implicit memory and procedural memory.

✓ Implicit memory: It does not require awareness of the learning

episode. One well-studied of implicit memory is priming. A
typical priming task is comprised of ‘study’ and ‘test’ phases.
During the study phase, participants are exposed to a series of
words or pictures. For eg: they might have to identify briefly
flashed words or generate as many words as possible when cued
with the semantic category ‘fruit’. Priming is measured as the
basis or facilitation in task performance induced by recent
exposure to task stimuli, as compared with a baseline condition
 in which that word had not appeared on the prior study list.
Studies in normal participants have identified 2 types of
priming: perceptual priming requires analysis of perceptual
attributes of a stimulus (eg: identification of perceptually
degraded stimuli) and conceptual priming requires analysis of
the meaning of a stimulus (eg: category exemplar generation).

✓ Procedural memory: It is involved in the acquisition of skills

and habits resulting from the previous experience, and is
relatively impervious to the effects of decay or interference.
Procedural memory is in the hands on learning. For example,
when we learn a skill such as riding a bike to speed & accuracy
in driving or playing a sport & swinging in golf club,
procedural memory is necessary. These skills can only be
learned by physically doing them. It is automatic memory. It
refers to several forms of learning that occurs during the
performance of various tasks, which is typically expressed in
enhanced or speeded performance (Squire, 2004). Procedural
memory system composed of a large network of brain
structures including basal ganglia, frontal cortex, parietal cortex
& cerebellum (these regions may play a role in the maintenance
in working memory for linguistic elements and in learning of
grammatical rules underlying the regularities of complex
structures).

 STAGES OF MEMORY:

For psychologists, the term memory covers 3 important aspects of information

processing:

 Memory encoding
 Memory storage
 Memory retrieval
  Memory encoding: When information comes into our memory system
(from sensory input), it needs to be changed into a form that the system can
cope with, so that it can be stored. Think of this as similar to changing yout
money into a different currency when you travel from one country to
another. For example, a word which is seen (in a book) may be stored if it is
changed (encoded) into a sound or a meaning (i.e. semantic processing).
There are 3 main ways in which the information can be encoded (changed):
 visual (picture)
 acoustic (sound)
 semantic (processing)
For eg: How do you remember a telephone number you have looked up in the
phone book?

If you can see it, then you are using visual coding, but if you are repeating it to
yourself, you are using acoustic coding (by sound). Evidence suggest that this is
the principle coding system in STM is acoustic coding. When a person is presented
with a list of numbers and letters, they will try to hold them in STM by rehearsing
them (verbally). Rehearsal is a verbal process regardless of whether the list of
items is presented acoustically (someone reads them out), or visually (on a sheet of
paper). The principle encoding system in LTM appears to be semantic coding (by
meaning). However, information in LTM can also be coded both visually and
acoustically.

 Memory storage: This concerns the nature of memory stores, i.e. where the
information is stored, how long the memory lasts for (duration), how much
can be stored at any time (capacity) and what kind of information is held.
The way we store information affects the way we retrieve it. There has been
a significant amount of research regarding the differences between STM and
LTM. Most adults can store between 5 and 9 items in their STM. Miller
(1956) put this idea forward and he called it the magic number 7. He thought
that STM capacity was 7 (plus or minus 2) items because it only had a
certain number of ‘slots’ in which the items could be stored. However,
Miller didn’t specify the amount of information that can be held in each slot.
Indeed, if we can ‘chunk’ information together, we can store a lot more
information in our STM. In contrast, the capacity of LTM is thought to be
 unlimited. Information can only be stored for a brief duration in STM (0-30
seconds), but LTM can last a lifetime.

 Memory retrieval: This refers to getting information out storage. If we

can’t remember something, it may be because we are unable to retrieve it.
When we asked to retrieve something from memory, the differences between
STM and LTM become very clear. STM is stored and retrieved sequentially.
For example, if a group of participants are given a list of words to
remember, and then asked to recall the fourth word on the list, participants
go through the list in the order they heard it in order to retrieve the
information. LTM is stored and retrieved by association. This is why you
can remember what you went upstairs for if you go back to the room where
you first thought about it. Organizing information can help aid retrieval. You
can organize information in sequences (such as alphabetically, by size or by
time). Imagine a patient being discharged from hospital whose treatment
involved taking various pills at various times, changing their dressing and
doing exercises. If the doctor gives these instructions in the order which they
must be carried out throughout the day (i.e. in sequence of time), this will
help the patient to remember them.

 NEUROANATOMY OF MEMORY:
Figures: The brain structures that are involved in memory.

Many brain structures are involved in the process of memory. All are linked in a
limbic circuit in 1927.

Papez was convinced that the human cortex and hypothalamus were necessary for
subjective human emotion. Over time, these same structures were found to be
intimately involved with memory abilities. The linkage with memory and emotion
is understandable given that the experiences with strong emotional context are
better retained. For example, many would remember what they were doing at the
time of a great tragedy such as the death of Mr. Rajiv Gandhi, recall of breakfast
menu from just 2 hours earlier, however is more difficult.

The Papez circuit (3 figures as shown below) originates in the hippocampal

formations situated on the medial aspect of the temporal lobes. Each hippocampus
receives inputs from adjacent parahippocampal gyrus and entrohinal cortex. Each
of these structures, in turn, receives inputs from more widespread cortical
association territories. Hippocampal neurons provide input through the fornices to
the septal area and mamillary bodies. Neurons from the mamillary bodies project
to the anterior nucleus of the thalamus via the mammilio-thalamic tract. The limbic
system includes this medial group of structures located at the border between
cortex and hypothalamus. Disruption anywhere in this circuit, especially if bilateral
will cause a memory disturbance.
 Figures: The Papez circuit

Investigations done revealed that explicit and implicit memory processes were
found to be separable neuroanatomically. Explicit or declarative memory involves
fact or knowledge acquisition. The medial temporal lobes are known to be
important in this process. The hippocampus, which is located within the temporal
cortex near the temporal horns bilaterally, is also important in explicit or
declarative memory. Researchers have found that in cases of isolated hippocampal
damage, a less severe amnesia results if the medial temporal lobe is not involved.
Studies using fMRI and PET show that the hippocampus is important in linking
unrelated bits of information during the memory and acquisition process. Left
medial temporal and thalamic lesions tend to disrupt nonverbal memory.

Other brain territories supporting declarative memory include the medial

diencephalons, the basal forebrain, and pre-frontal cortex. The medial
diencephalon is located at the rostral part of the brainstem and consists of 4
structures: thalamus, epithalamus, hypothalamus and sub thalamus. Of these,
thalamus and hypothalamus are involved with memory. Thalamus is the largest
part of the medial diencephalon and functions as a relay station for sensory
information to the entire cerebral cortex. Of the many smaller nuclei that make up
thalamus, the anterior thalamic nucleus has reciprocal connections with pre-frontal
cortex, hypothalamus, amygdala, temporal neo-cortex and other thalamic nuclei
that integrate sensory information with emotional and subjective states. The
hypothalamus forms the floor of the diencephalon along with the optic chiasm, and
is responsible for CNS regulation of vegetative and endocrine function. The
mamillary bodies are part of the caudal hypothalamus and are encapsulated by
densely myelinated fiber tracts laterally from the fornix, and medially from
tegmentum and thalamus. The basal forebrain is located superior to the optic
chiasm and includes the medial septal nuclei, anterior hypothalamus, part of
prefrontal cortex, nucleus accumbens, nucleus basalis of Meynert, and the diagonal
band of Broca. These structures send projections to all association cortices,
hippocampus, and amygdala. The basal forebrain obtains its vascular supply from
the anterior communicating artery; the basal forebrain has been implicated in
Alzheimer’s disease.

The pre-frontal cortex is important in working memory. Pre-frontal cortex also

supports memory processes necessary for temporal ordering, knowing when in
time and place an event-occurred and knowing how the information was acquired.
Impairment of this latter process is known as “source amnesia”.

In contrast to explicit or declarative memory, implicit or non-declarative memory

does not involve hippocampal or any other structures named above. Nondeclarative
memory refers to performance subtypes based on unconscious learning and builds
slowly over time with multiple repetitions. Procedural memory is subserved by the
corpus striatum, an important structure in motor planning and performance. The
corpus striatum, the largest of basal ganglia, is affected in Parkinson’s and
Huntington’s diseases and accordingly, patients with these disorders show
impaired procedural learning. Associative learning, such as in classical and operant
conditioning, is the pairing of a neutral stimulus with a learned response. When the
learned response is fear or another strong emotion, the amygdala is involved. If the
response is a skeletal muscle movement, the cerebellum is involved. Priming
phenomena have been shown to involve other areas of neo-cortex and possibly
subcortical structures such as the caudate nucleus.

Memory loss (or) amnesia:

 1) Amnesia: partial or total memory loss
2) Retrograde amnesia: difficulty in recalling events prior to the onset of the
amnesia
3) Anterograde amnesia: inability to remember events subsequent to the onset
of the amnesia

Brain lesion and amnesia:

 Patients with pathologies show about 5 regions that are consistently said to
correlate with some form of memory loss. Anterior temporal cortex, medial
temporal regions, medial thalamus, mamillary bodies and basal forebrain.
 Temporal lobe: it includes the structures such as the anterior temporal
neocortex, amygdala, and entorhinal cortex.
 The amygdala lies in front of the hippocampus (it has a role in the amnesic
patients). It has a major role in emotions.
 Diencephalon: it consists of both thalamus and hypothalamus. Dorsal medial
nucleus and the mamillary bodies are frequently degenerated in the chronic
alcoholics who exhibit Korsakoff’s syndrome.
 Pre-frontal cortex: direct damage to the frontal lobes does not produce
amnesia, but often amnesic patients have frontal brain damage. For eg:
people with basal forebrain strokes often have damage to the pre-frontal
cortex and chronic alcoholics often have atrophy of the frontal cortex. They
have difficulties in STM.

Effects of unilateral hippocampal lesions on memory:

Patients with unilateral lesions of the hippocampus do not suffer from severe
amnesia, but they do have significant memory deficits. Performance on
mazelearning tasks is correlated with damage to the right hippocampus: the larger
the removal, the larger the deficit.

Subjects with damage to the right hippocampus do not learn the repeating sequence
or do so very slowly, where as the subjects with other cortical lesions perform as
controls. The left hippocampus is important for memory of verbal material, the
right in the memory of visual and spatial material. Bilateral damage to either the
hippocampus or the diencephalon produces global anterograde amnesia.
Diencephalic lesions produce a longer period of retrograde amnesia and head
trauma usually produces a shorter period of retrograde amnesia.

Amnesia from other neocortical damage: Neo-cortical lesions alone have not
shown to produce amnesia. Cortical injuries in the parietal, posterior temporal and
possibly occipital cortex sometimes produce specific LTM difficulties. Eg: colour
amnesia, face amnesia, object amnesia and topographical amnesia.

Traumatic amnesia: Head injuries commonly produce a form of amnesia. There is

typically a transient loss of consciousness followed by a short period of confusion.

 NEUROCHEMISTRY AND NEUROPHYSIOLOGY OF MEMORY:

Several neurotransmitters affect memory. Acetylcholine, the first one to be

described, has 2 receptor types, nicotinic and muscarinic, the latter of which are
the most involved with memory. Scopolamine, a cholinergic antagonist, can
induce memory deficits in normal adults and medications designed to increase
acetylcholine have been somewhat successful in improving memory function in
patients with post-traumatic and post-encephalitic amnesia. Deficiency of central
cholinergic transmission is a hypothesized mechanism of Alzheimer’s disease.
Researchers began to consider monaminergic involvement in memory because the
improvements in memory were observed in amnesics taking clonidine, a centrally
active antagonist. Norepinephrine, the major adrenergic transmitter, is synthesized
from dopamine and influences arousal, memory and affect.

Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that originates from the raphe nuclei near the
midline of the brainstem. These neurons project axons to the brainstem and are
involved with sleep and arousal states. The application of serotonin to invertebrate
sensory neurons increases short-term facilitation after a single exposure, and
longterm facilitation after 5 or more repeated exposures. Long-term facilitation
produces new protein synthesis produces new protein synthesis and is thought to
represent a molecular mechanism of memory. Inhibitors of protein or mRNA
synthesis blocks LTM selectively. Other neurotransmitters identified in this area
and linked to memory include glutamate and γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA).
Opiate and glucocorticoid receptors are also involved and high cortisol levels may
lead to the hippocampal (or) hippocampus atrophy.
  MODELS OF MEMORY:

 THE ATKINSON-SHIFFRIN MODEL

 LEVELS OF PROCESSING MODEL
 EPISODIC AND SEMANTIC MEMORY: TULVING’S MODEL
 A MODEL FOR LEARNING: THE INFORMATION
PROCESSING MODEL

 THE ATKINSON-SHIFFRIN MODEL:

Richard Atkinson & Richard Shiffrin (1968) developed a multi-store model that is
often discussed. Because the Atkinson-Shiffrin theory quickly became the standard
approach, if often called the model. The Atkinson-Shiffrin model proposed that the
memory can be understood as a sequence of discrete steps, in which the
information is transferred from one storage area to another. The model proposes
that the memory consists of 3 memory stores:

✓ Sensory memory
✓ Short-term memory
✓ Long-term memory

The 3 stages of memory: encoding, storage and retrieval do not operate in the same
way for all situations. The basis for the distinction between the different memories
corresponding to different time intervals was formalized by Richard Atkinson &
Richard Shiffrin (1968). The basis tenants are:

✓ Sensory store: Information arriving from the environment is first placed into
what is termed ‘sensory store’. It has 3 main characteristics: It contains all
the information captured by the sense organs from the environment. Sensory
store is transient. Therefore, the information from this store decays over a
period of time ranging a few 10ths of a second (for visual sensory store) to a
few seconds (for auditory sensory store). The small portion of the

information in sensory store that is attended to is transferred into the next

major component of the system, short-term store.
 ✓ Short-term store: Short-term store is the next repository of information, into
which attended information from sensory store is placed. It has 5 main
characteristics: It is information that you are conscious of. It is readily
accessible to be used as the foundation for making decisions or carrying out
tasks in times of seconds or less. All else being equal, information will decay
in approximately 20 seconds. Information can be prevented from decay
through rehearsal. Information can undergo other forms of processing,
elaboration when transferred to the long-term store. It is acoustically coded.

✓ Long-term store: Long-term store is the large repository of information that

we maintain of all information that is generally available to us. It has 3 main
characteristics: Information enters it via elaborative process from STM.
Capacity of long-term store is unlimited. Information via the process is
retrieval can be places back into the short-term store where it can be used to
carry out task at hand. Information stored in long-term memory is relatively
permanent, and not likely to be lost. It is semantically coded. Information
from LTM can be passed into STM when we want to work with the
information again. Atkinson & Shiffrin also proposed control processes,
which are the strategies that people use flexibly and voluntary, depending on
the nature of material and their own personal preferences. One kind of
control process is rehearsal. Rehearsal is the silent repetition of information
that encourages at recycling through STM. According to the model
information that is rehearsal frequently and kept for a long time in STM is
more likely to be transferred to LTM.

Control processed can work in other ways. For example, a person can decide
whether they want to fill their STM with the material that needs to be remembered
or leave work space to think about something else. They can decide whether to use
a particular memory strategy. Eg: mutual picture to encode.

External input

Lost from sensory memory sensory memory

Lost from STM (working memory) STM

Lost from LTM LTM

Research on the model:

Kintsch & Buschke’s research: Kintsch & Buschke (1969) asked people to learn
16 English words in order. They proposed that the words from the beginning of the
list would be LTM when recall was requested because so much time has passed
since they were presented. On the other hand, the most recent items should still be
short memory. Their research focused on 1 distinction that the duplex theorists had
proposed material in STM’s coded in term of its semantic or meaning
characteristics. The first study examined whether the items at the beginning of the
list –which were presumably in LTM –would be influenced by the semantic
factors. The second study examined whether the items at the end of the list –which
were presumably in STM –would be influenced by acoustic factors.

2 lists similar to those used by Kintsch & Buschke (1969):

List 1- semantically similar pairs List 2- acoustically similar pairs
Angry Tacks
Pleased So
Forest Buy
Sofa Owe
Ocean Tied
Carpet Their
Sea Tax
Happy By
Rug There
Mad Oh
Couch Tide
Woods Sew

After the material had been presented the experimenters supplied 1 word from the
list. Eg: pleased. The participants were requested to supply the next word in the
list. The correct answer would be forest. However, suppose that a person confuses
the word, pleased with its synonym happy. This person might supply the word rug
as the answer; because rug follows happy. Kintsch & Buschke measured the
number of instances of this kind of semantic confusion that occurred for items in
each part of the list. They found that the items at the beginning of the list produced
greater number of semantic confusions than the items at the end of the list, which
should be in LTM, are coded in terms of their meaning.

The 2nd list is comparable to Kintsch & Buschke’s acoustically similar list. If a
person confuses 2 words that sound the same, then he/she might see the word so
and respond there, because so was confused with sew, which appeared before
there. They found that the acoustic confusions were more likely at the end of the
list than at the beginning of the list. This result suggests that the items at the end of
the list, which should be coded in STM, are encoded in terms of their sound.

Rundus’s research: According to Atkinson & Shiffrin (1968), items that are
frequently rehearsed would be the most likely to transferred to LTM. An
experiment by Dewey Rundus (1971) tested this hypothesis and also provided
evidence that seemed to support another part of the model. Rundus presented the
list of 20 nouns to students, who were instructed to rehearse the words by saying
out aloud any word that they currently reviewing. Rundus recorded the number of
times each word was rehearsed, as well as the number of words the student recalled
later.

The term serial effect is used to refer to the U shaped relationship between a
word’s positions in a list of probability of recall. The serial position effect
highlights 2 common findings- primary effect (better recall for items at the end of
a list).

The words at the beginning of the list were rehearsed much more often than the
later words. The model proposes that these early words are rehearsed often enough
to be passed on into LTM; they can easily retrieve during recall. By the time, the
student sees the 6th word, key has such a backlog of earlier items that the frequent
rehearsed is impossible. The probability of recall decreases rapidly as a function of
serial position, for the 1st part of the list. In other words, the primary effect seems
to be explained very efficiently by the frequency of rehearsal.

The high probability to recall for the items 13-20 cannot be explained by rehearsal
patterns. Rundus (1971) suggests that the model can account for the regency effect
as it can be explained by the concept of STM (i.e) these items are still in STM
when the experimenter asks for recall.

Neuroscience research: Neuro-physiological findings suggest that a separate

memory store could be located structurally within the human brain. The most
famous case of H.M was presented by Brenda Miller (1996). H.M had a bilateral
surgical excision (of the media temporal region) following severe epilepsy. He
became profoundly amnesic and could not store new information in LTM, yet his
STM was unimpaired. The LTMs formed before the operation was normal.
Because the lesions took place in the temporal lobe and the hippocampus, it is
apparent that these sites contain important memory structures. Specifically, it is
apparent that the hippocampus is an interim depository for LTM in which early
experienced information is processed and then transferred to the cerebral cortex for
more permanent storage. Patients such as H.M with temporal lobe lesions can learn
implicit types of tasks that involve perceptual and motor skills. Furthermore, these
patients can retain memory of these tasks for long periods of time. The 2nd case of a
man, K.F. with a portion of the left side of his cerebral cortex damaged had normal
long-term retention but severely limited STM (Shallice & Warrington, 1970).

Evidence against Akinston & Shiffrin: Recent research has shown that the items
in STM can also be coded in term of their meaning (Nilsson 1992). Theorists
pointed out that we often have a clear representation of the sound not an item in
LTM; for eg: you can probably recall the sound of song you heard on the radio
yesterday. In other words, STM may be primarily acoustics, and LTM may be
primarily semantic, but the distinction may be fuzzy.

Recent researchers have also demonstrated a long-term regency effect or better

recall for items at the end of the list, when that list was learned long ago. Probably,
the mechanism that explains the recency effect does not involve STM.

In the neuroscience evidence, K.F. had abnormal STM and LTM. This model
proposes that the information must pass through STM before long term learning
can occur. If K.F. has abnormal STM, then how could his LTM be normal!

Criticisms of the model: Like all the influential models and theories, the
AtkinsonShiffrin model attracted criticisms, some were:
The sensory stores are sensory systems, not memory systems as most people think
of the term ‘memory’. This model suggests that there is nothing between STM and
LTM. However, evidence shows that the information can reside somewhere
between the extremes of active attention and long-term storage. Memories can be
‘warmed up’ but outside of attention. In other words, intermediate levels of
activation are possible. This model implies that there is just 1 short-term system
and long-term system. In reality, there are many memory systems operating in
parallel. Each has both short and long-term operations. The Atkinson-Shiffrin
model doesn’t give enough emphasis to unconscious processes. Unconscious
activation is shown with a tentative, dotted arrow. Modern researchers find that
unconscious and implicit forms of memory are more common than consciously
directed memory processes.

Capacity: STM favours an explanation in terms of the storage limitations. When

we look at the range of number of items that STM can hold, it ranges from 3 to 5 to
9 to 20 words in a sentence. This range is usually explained in terms of recording
into ‘chunks’ of information. However, we need an independent definition or
measurement of chunk, which is not there.

 LEVELS OF PROCESSING MODEL:

The working memory (WM) model has been much more effective than the
multistore model in explaining the active nature of STM processing. It allows for
the different types of processing depending on the nature of incoming information,
but it does not consider the effects of differential processing on long-term retention
of information. An important approach which looked specifically at this aspect was
put forward by Craik & Lockhart (1972). They rejected the idea of separate
memory structures put forward by Atkinson & Shiffrin and believed, instead, that
the stimulus inputs go through a variety of processing operations. According to
them, processing varies in terms of depth, ‘Trace persistence is a function of depth
of analysis, with deeper levels of analysis associated with more elaborate, longer
lasting, and stronger traces’. The first stages of processing are shallow and involve
recognizing the stimulus in terms of its physical appearance. Eg: the shape of the
letters a word is written in. the deepest level of processing involves the coding the
input in terms of its meaning. Rehearsing material simply by rote repetition, as in
the Atkinson & Shiffrin model, is called the maintenance rehearsal and is
regarded as shallow processing. It is distinguished from the elaborative rehearsal
in which the links are made to semantic associations. The assumption of the model
is that shallow processing will give rise to weak, short-term retention, whereas the
deep processing will ensure strong, lasting retention. This central assumption has
been tested in numerous studies. For eg: Hyde & Jenkins (1973) presented the
auditory lists of 24 words and asked different groups of participants to perform one
of the following so-called orienting tasks:

➢ Rating the words for pleasantness

➢ Estimating the frequency with which each word is used in the English
language
➢ Detecting the occurrence of the letters ‘e’ and ‘g’ in any of the words
➢ Deciding the part of speech appropriate to each word (eg: noun & adjective)
➢ Deciding whether the words fitted into a particular sentence frame

Half the participants were told in advance that they would be expected to recall the
words (intentional learning group) and the other half were not (incidental learning
group). After testing all the participants for recall of the original word list, Hyde &
Jenkins found that there were minimal differences in the number of items correctly
recalled between the intentional learning groups and the incidental leaning groups.
This finding is predicted by Craik & Lockhart because they believe that the
retention simply a product of processing and so intention to learn is unnecessary
for learning to occur. In addition, it was found that recall was significantly better
for words which had been analyzed semantically (i.e. rated for pleasantness or for
frequency) than words which had been rated more superficially (i.e. detecting ‘e’

& ‘g’). This is also in line with the theory because semantic analysis is assumed to
be a deeper level of processing than structural analysis.

Evaluation of levels of processing: The level of processing approach was

influential when it was first formulated, and the researchers in the field welcomed
its emphasis on mental processes rather than on rigid structures. However, it soon
became clear that the model was too simplistic and that it was descriptive rather
than explanatory. A major problem is circularity (i.e) there is no independent
definition of depth. The model predicts that the deep processing will lead to better
retention –researchers then concluded that, because retention is better after certain
orienting tasks, they must, by definition, involve deep processing. Think back to
the Hyde & Jenkins study, for example. The orienting task that gave rise to the
lowest level of recall was the sentence frame task. Hyde & Jenkins assumed that
the poor recall reflected shallow processing and yet, on the face of it, the
judgments about sentence frames would appear to require semantic analysis and
thus, deep processing.

Other researchers have questioned the idea that the depth of processing alone is
responsible for retention. Tyler et al (1979), for example, gave the participants 2
sets of anagrams to solve. Some were easy like DOCTRO and others were more
difficult such as OCDRTO. In a subsequent, unexpected, recall task, the
participants remembered more of the difficult than the easy anagrams, inspite of
processing levels being the same. Tyler & colleagues suggested that the retention
was influenced by the amount of processing effort rather than depth.

Craik & Lockhart (1986) themselves have since suggested that the factors such as
elaboration and distinctiveness are also important in determining the rate of
retention; this idea has been supported by the research. For example, Hunt &
Elliott (1980) found that the people recalled words with distinctive sequences of
tall and short letters better than the words with less distinctive arrangement of
letters. Palmere et al (1983) made up a 32 paragraph description of a fictitious
African nation. 8 paragraphs consisted of a sentence containing a main idea,
followed by 3 sentences each providing an example of the main theme; 8
paragraphs consisted of 1 main sentence followed by 2 supplementary sentences; 8
paragraphs consisted of 1 main sentence followed by a single supplementary
sentence; and the remaining 8 paragraphs consisted of a single main sentence with
no supplementary information. Recall of the main ideas varied as a function of the
amount of elaboration. Significantly, more main ideas were recalled from the
elaborated paragraphs than from the single-sentence paragraphs. This kind of
evidence suggests that the effects of processing on retention are not as simple as
first proposed by the levels of the processing model.

 EPISODIC AND SEMANTIC MEMORY - TULVING’S MODEL:

Tulving’s original model distinguished between only 2 kinds of memory, episodic

and semantic (Tulving, 1972). Since then, he has added another category called
procedural memory, and he also constitutes that the STM constitutes a separate
memory system (1993a). Tulving’s emphasis on a separation between STM and
other kinds of memory makes his current model compatible with the structure of
the Atkinson –Shriffin model.

Episodic memory- it stores information about when the events happened and the
relationship between those events. This information refers to personal experiences.
Eg: Having seen or heard something.

The telephone rang a short while ago, followed by a thud when the snow fell off
the roof.

I saw a student faint in class yesterday during a movie about neurosurgery.

I have a dental appointment tomorrow at 3.30 PM.

The first word I saw on this memory test was eyebrow.

Episodic memory thus includes event that happened and events that will happen.

Semantic memory- it is the organized knowledge about the world. It involves a

fairly constant knowledge structure, in contrast to the changing event registered in
episodic memory. It includes knowledge about words, but it includes many things
we know that cannot readily be expressed in words. The term semantic may be too
narrow, terms like generic memory may be more descriptive, but the less accurate
item is used.

Eg: I know that meaning of the word semantic is closer to the meaning of the word
vocabulary than it is to the word disarmament.

I remember that the chemical formula for water is H2O.

I know what a French angel fish looks like.

I know that the shortest day of the year is in December.

Characteristics Episodic memory Semantic memory
Source of information Sensory experiences Comprehension
Units of information Episodes and events Concepts, ideas and facts
Organization Time related Conceptual
Emotional content of the More important Less important
 memory
Likelihood of forgetting Great Small
Time required to Relatively long time Relatively short time
remember the
information
How is it tested Recall of particular General knowledge
episodes
General usefulness Less useful More useful

Procedural memory- Tulving later added a third category to his model. While
episodic and semantic memories focus on the factual information, procedural
memory involves knowing how to do something, or learning connections between
stimuli and responses.

Eg: I know how to ride a bike.

I know how to tip the frying pan just right when making Injera, an Ethiopian
pancake.

I can start my car and put it into reverse.

I can dial the operator on the telephone.

Procedural knowledge is often difficult to describe verbally. Eg: You could read a
book about how to ride a bike but that information, yet that the verbal information
is unlikely to keep you from falling.

Procedural knowledge can sometimes be more complete than comparable semantic

knowledge. Eg: tying a bow.

Tulving (1993) argues that the procedural knowledge is the first 5 stem to develop
during infancy, followed by the semantic knowledge and last of all the episodic
memory.

Tulving’s reasons for supporting a multiple memory system:

➔ Profound generalizations cannot be made about all the different kinds of

memory; a generalization about the episodic memory may not apply to
semantic memory.
 ➔ Memory in humans has come about though a long evolutionary process,
characterized by sudden twists and turns, and other one irregularities.
Human brain structures concerned with memory probably reflect these
evolutionary quirks; they are likely to be more complex. (Sherry &
Schacter , 1987)
➔ The varieties of memory that seem so different cannot involve the same
underlying set of structures.

Research on Tulving’s model:

Neuroscience research: Tulving argues that some of the strongest support for his
theory comes from the neuroscience research studies.

PET: Tulving asked volunteers to perform a variety of semantic retrieval tasks in

which they thought about general impersonal knowledge (eg: one professor
recalled information about the history of astronomy). The PET results showed the
greatest activity in the back part of the cerebral cortex.

The same volunteers were also instructed to perform a variety of episodic retrieval
tasks in which they thought about a particular personal experience. (eg: the
professor recalled a Sunday afternoon excursion that had taken place a few days
earlier). The PET scans showed the greatest activity in the frontal lobe of the
cerebral cortex.

Most recent neuroscience research has refined the knowledge about the biological
basis of episodic memory. Specifically, the left frontal lobe of the cortex is
especially active when the episodic information is encoded into memory. In
contrast, the right frontal lobe is more active in retrieving episodic memory.
(Tulving et al, 1994; Tulving & Knoll, 1995) Critics of Tulving’s theory are not
convinced by these neurological studies (eg: Baddeley, 1984; McKoon et al, 1986).
They argue that the subject may show different PET scan patterns for any 2 tasks
maybe even 2 similar semantic tasks.

Brain lesions: Tulving believes that his theory is supported by several studies by
K.C. a, Canadian man who had experienced the brain lesions throughout both the
left and the right hemispheres of his cortex during a motorcycle accident. Tulving
argues that K.C. had impressive semantic memory but poor episodic memory. (eg:
he knew many things about the world, including history, geography, politics and
music. However, he could not retrieve from the episodic memory any incident that
occurred at his cottage)

Critics such as Eysenck & Keane (1990) argue that it isn’t fair to compare amnesic
individuals’ semantic and episodic memory. Language and world information were
typically acquired before the onset of amnesia, while typical test of episodic
memory are based on the information acquired after the onset of amnesia.

To address this problem, Tulving & his associates conducted numerous sessions in
which they attempted to teach new semantic information to KC. In one task KC;
learned new semantic definitions for selected words (eg: a parakeet was defined as
a ‘talkative, featherbrain’). K.C. recalled about the same number of items as 3
control individuals without any signs of amnesia, when all the 4 were tested more
than a year after the material was learned. Thus K.C.’s normal semantic memory
cannot be explained simply in terms of material learned prior to his motorcycle
accident.

Correlational Research Underwood & his colleagues (1978) took a different

approach in trying to determine whether the episodic and the semantic memory
involve different processes. They tested 200 medical college students on 28
different measures of episodic memory and 5 different measures of semantic
memory. The episodic memory, tests included standard tasks such as free recall
and serial learning. The semantic memory tests mainly emphasized vocabulary.

In general, people’s scores on the episodic memory tests were not closely
correlated with their scores on the semantic memory tests. If only one kind of
memory were being assessed on these tasks, a high correlation would be found
among these tasks. The low co-relations are consistent with a model in which the
episodic memory and the semantic memory are separate.

Other investigations of the episodic/semantic distinction: Schoben & his

colleagues (1978) found that a variable related to semantic memory (sentence
verification) influenced performance on a semantic memory task, whereas a
variable related to episodic memory (sentence recognition) had no effect. In
contrast, a variable related to episodic memory influenced the performance on an
episodic memory task, whereas a variable related to semantic memory had no
effect. Other research does not support the semantic-episodic distinction. Ratcliff
& McKoon (1978), episodic memory emphasizes the conceptual relationships, and
not simply time related organization. They also demonstrated experimentally that
the episodic information can be recalled very quickly (1986).

The current status on Tulving’s Model: Reviews of the research on Tulving

Model are skeptical about the distinction between episodic and semantic memory
(eg: Humph1eys et al,1989; Johnson & Hasher, 1987; Richardson-Klavehn &
Bjork, 1988; Scareleman & Henmann, 1994). Tulving (1986) pointed out that the
evidence for this distinction is not strong. He also suggested that the episodic
memory may be an important kind of semantic memory –rather than being an
entirely separate system.

At present, the psychologists are more likely to agree that the procedural memory
represents a separate system (Baddeley, 1990). They argue that knowing how to do
something seems distinctly different from knowing or remembering the
information. However, this position is based more 011 intuitive feeling than on
empirical research. However, this organizational framework is useful, even if the
psychologists are not convinced that the distinction actually occurs in the human
memory.

 A MODEL FOR LEARNING –THE INFORMATION PROCESSING

MODEL:

This model consists of the senses, Perceptual register, STM, WM, Sense and
meaning, Long-term storage, the cognitive belief system and self-concept.
 Figure: The Information Processing Model

The senses: Our brain takes in more information from our environment in a single
day than the largest computer does in years. That information is detected by our 5
senses. The senses do not contribute equally to our learning. Over the course of our
lives, sight, hearing and touch contribute to about 95% of all new learning. Our
senses constantly collect bits of information from the environment, even while we
sleep. These bits average 40000/second over the course of a day.

Perceptual register: The brain has evolved a structure that screens all the incoming
data to determine the importance to the individual. This structure is commonly
called the perceptual or sensory register. The technical name for it is the reticular
activating system (RAS) and is located in the brainstem. The perceptual register
monitors the strength and nature of the secondary impulses in msecs, and it uses
the individuals experience to determine the data’s degree of importance. Most of
the data signals are unimportant, so the perceptual register blocks them and they
drop out of the processing system. For instance, we are able to study even amidst
noise; this is because of the perceptual register. The perceptual register is blocking
these repetitive stimuli, allowing the brain to focus on more important things. This
process is called perceptual filtering.
Short-term memory (STM): If the sensory data are important, or if the perceptual
register becomes overloaded, the data are passed on to the short memory. The STM
area is represented in the model as a clipboard, a place where we put information
until we make a decision on how to dispose of it. STM operates subconsciously
and hold data from 1 second to 24 hours. The individual’s experience decides its
importance. If the datum is of little or no importance within this time frame, it
drops out of the system.

Working memory (WM): Working Memory (WM) is the second temporary area
where the conscious processing occurs. The model represents WM as a work table,
a place of limited capacity where we can build, take apart, or rework ideas for
eventual storage somewhere else. When something is in WM, it generally captures
our focus and demands our attention. WM is temporary and can deal with items for
only a limited time. Hermann (1880) concluded that we can process the items
intently in WM for up to 45 minutes before becoming fatigued.

Sense and Meaning: The criterion for the information to be pushed into the LTM
depends on 2 parameters; sense and meaning. Sense refers to whether the learner
can understand the item based on the experience and whether it fits into what the
learner knows about how the world works. Meaning refers to whether the item is
relevant to the learner and for what purpose should the learner remember it. For
instance, a 15 year student is told that the minimum age for getting a driver’s
license is 16, but is 17 in a neighbouring state. He can understand this information,
so it satisfies the sense criterion. But the age in his own state is much relevant to
him, since this where he will apply for his license. Chances are high that he will
remember his own state’s minimum age (it has sense and meaning) but will forget
that of the neighbouring state since it has sense but lacks meaning.

Sense and meaning are independent of each other. Thus, it is possible to remember
an item because it makes sense but has no meaning. It is also possible to remember
an item that makes no sense but has meaning. Of the 2 criteria, meaning has the
probability that the information will be stored.

Long-term storage: Storing occurs when the hippocampus encodes information

and sends it to one or more long term storage areas. The encoding process takes
time. While the learners may seem to have acquired the new information, there is
no guarantee that there will be permanent storage after the lesson. Research on
retention shows that the greatest loss of newly acquired information or a skill
occurs within 18-24 hours, the 24 hour period is a reasonable guideline for
determining if information was transferred into long term storage. If a learner
cannot recall new learning after 24 hours, there is high probability that it was not
stored and thus, can never be recalled. The long term storage areas are represented
in the model as file cabinets –places where the information is kept in some type of
order.

LTM & long term storage: LTM refers to the process of storing and retrieving
information. Long term storage refers to where in the brain the memories are kept.
By analogy, long term storage sites can be compared to a library and LTM can be
compared to a librarian who retrieves information and returns it to its proper
storage places.

The cognitive belief system: The total of all that is in long term storage areas forms
the basis for our view of the world around us. This information helps us to make
sense out of events, to understand the laws of nature, to recognize cause and effect,
and to form decisions about goodness, truth and beauty. This total construct of how
we see the world is called the cognitive belief system. It is shown in the model as a
large triangle extending beyond the long term storage areas (file cabinets). It is
drawn this way to show that the thoughts and understandings that arise from the
long term storage data are greater than the sum of the individual items.

Self-concept: Deep within the cognitive belief system lies the self-concept. While
the cognitive belief system portrays the way we see the world, the self-concept
describes the way we view ourselves in that world. The self concept is represented
in the model as a face and is placed at the apex of the triangle to emphasize its
importance. Self-concept is used here as a neutral term that can run the gamut from
very positive to very negative. The learner’s self-concept has closed off the
receptivity to the new information. Someone who has a very successful student in
mathematics remembers how success boosted self-concept. As a result, the
individual now feels confident when faced with basic mathematical problems. On
the other hand, if this person was a poor mathematics student, the lack of success
lowered the self-concept. Consequently, the individual will avoid dealing with the
mathematical problems whenever possible. People will participate in learning
activities that have yielded success for them and avoids those that have produced
failure.
 Self-concept

High Neutral Low

 ASSESSMENT OF MEMORY:

Many common memory assessment procedures place a heavy burden on the

communicative functions by requiring comprehension of verbally presented
instructions, learning and retentions of verbal materials and demonstration of
learning and memory in verbal output.

Therefore, assessment of memory in communication disorders often requires the

accommodations in the assessment process. Eg: Neurogenic communication
disorders may necessitate the use of non-standard test administration with the
modified test instructions or attend test materials or both. These changes to
standard procedures however challenge the interpretation of test results.

Speech language clinicians have training that equips then with the ability to
understand this impact and therefore may be ideally suited to play a key role in the
evaluation of memory in communication disordered clients.

The speech language clinician’s goals are:

▪ Describing a current conceptual framework for memory assessment.

▪ Providing an overview of common memory assessment procedures.
▪ Identifying steps in the assessment which may be amenable to modification.

Conceptual foundations of memory assessment:

Understanding the conceptual framework of memory and their basic terms is an

essential first step in the process of memory assessment. Several memory processes
operate within both STM and LTM. The following processes have primary
relevance to memory assessment.

 Encoding or the processing of the incoming of the incoming information to

be stored.
 Storage, which is the maintenance to be stored.
 Retrieval or the application or recall of the stored material.

Many memory tests examine each of these processes, and different patterns of
impaired and preserved function are associated with the specific disease processes.

Several additional overlapping distinctions in memory are based on the type of

information remembered. One distinction is between semantic memory or factual
knowledge (eg: word meanings, person or object identities), and episodic memory
or memory for the specific events, including where and when the events occurred.
Another distinction is between declarative memory, or memories that one can
consciously recall, and procedural memory or memory demonstrated by improved
skill, verbal and spatial memory. Distinctions are made between verbal and spatial
memory. More recently, this distinction has been modified to reflect modality of
input or an auditory versus spatial locations.

Memory can also be viewed in terms of modalities of information input and output.
Modalities refer to whether the information to be remembered is presented to the
visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory or another sensory system. Standard memory
tests prescribe the modality of input and output, and the deviation from these
procedures can complicate the interpretation of test results. Making adaptive,
procedural modifications for the communication impaired examinee however is
often necessity for gathering information as to the status of memory skills.

Overview of procedures for assessing memory: A comprehensive memory

assessment examines STM and retention of the learned information, retrieval of
recent and remote information, STM capacity, and the effects of time delays and
interference or memory. It also examines a number of input modalities and, ideally,
includes both recall and recognition tests for each modality. An evaluation may
include an interview, self- or informant-report questionnaires, as well as a
complete memory test battery, or series of individual memory tests. The following
sections present a brief overview of memory procedures:
➔ Interviews and questionnaires
➔ Memory test batteries
➔ Individual memory tests

➔ Interviews and questionnaires: Clients are asked their full name, address,
birth date, marital and family history and a variety of other questions.
Difficulty recalling this over learned, highly familiar information is
instructive for subsequent test selection. Interviews are useful for
determining subjective experiences of memory impairment, although
memory complaints often occur in the absence of deficient performance on
objective memory tests. The interview process can be standardized for
objective data collection using the autobiographical memory interview. This
approach can characterize the temporal gradients in retrograde memory.
Memory is examined for 3 separate time periods (i.e. childhood, early
adulthood, and the most recent 5 year period) for semantic and episodic
personal memories. The use of questionnaires for self reporting memory
problems is based on the assumption that the memory impaired clients
accurately reported their memory problems, a premise that, as indicated
above, is often false. That is memory questionnaires have a weak
relationship with objective memory tests, and increased memory complaints
tend to occur in depression. Clinically, however, the self report
questionnaires such as interviews are useful for establishing the clients’
perception of their memory problems. For eg: denial of memory complaints
on a questionnaire in the context of poor memory test performance may
indicate an essential role for family members to establish treatment
compliance and the client safety given that clients who are unaware of their
deficits are typically ineffective users of compensatory strategies.

➔ Memory test batteries: Memory may be assessed with a variety of individual

tests, each aimed at a subset of memory types or processes or a
comprehensive single test battery. It should be noted that the batteries amy
not evaluate all the components of memory. Selection of individual tests or a
standardized memory battery must be based on consideration of the referral
 question, the time available for the evaluation, the suitable normative data
and the client’s ability level.

Most commonly used memory test batteries are: 

Wechsler Memory Scale-III (WMS-III)
 Wechsler Memory Scale-revised (WMS-R)
 Rivermead Behavioural Memory Test (RBMT)
TEST BATTERIES ADVANTAGES DISADVANTAGES
WMS-R  Takes less time to It does not include any
administer recognition testing to
 Updated sets of allow the examination of
norms with storage vs retrieval
expanded age deficits.
ranges are
available for many
of its subset
WMS-III Includes several subsets  Takes longer time to
aimed at surveying administer
learning and memory  Updated norms are
across auditory and unavailable
visual input modalities,
and require written,
spoken, or manual
responses.
RBMT  Examines pragmatic  Less sensitive in
memory mild head injuries
 Can be used for  Not well suited for
wide age span differential
diagnosis of
memory disorders

➔ Individual memory tests: Numerous individual memory tests are available,

and selection from these is generally made by considering the specific
assessment goals, time available, and in the case of a communication
disordered client. A frequently used individual memory tests is the
 California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT). It involves learning, recalling and
recognizing a 16-item list of words representing 4 semantic categories (eg:
tools & fruits). The CVLT can be scored manually or with commercially
available software that compares an individual score with a set of norms. An
updated version of the CVLT that uses different words and has improved
normative data has now become available. Interpretation of the deficits
accordingly to a framework of learning, storage and a retrieval, a model
strongly supported by the cognitive psychological studies of memory.

Considerations for assessment: Because assessing memory in communication

disorders frequently requires significant modifications of standard testing
procedures, the clinicians justifiably questions whether the test results can be
compared with the available normative data. Although the lack of population based
norms can present a difficult challenge in interpreting test data, clinicians should
bear in mind that the population-based normative references are mandatory for
assessment purposes.

Memory test adaptations: The presence of communication problems undermines

valid memory testing. The following steps are meant to guide clinicians in
planning and conducting a memory evaluation of communication disordered
clients.

Step1: Gather background information to determine the nature and severity of the
communication disorder consider how the communication problem might affect
test requirements including comprehension of task instructions or verbal responses.

Step 2: Consider the purpose of evaluation to help guide what the performance
standards should be applied when interpreting test results.

Step 3: If a client has comprehension problems, select memory tests that minimize
language processing demand.

Step 4: When a client has speech or language production problems, select the tests
on which the memory performance is not judged on the basis of verbal output.

Step 5: If a client has visuo-spatial deficits or graphomotor aphasia, test selection

must minimize visuo-spatial and drawing requirements.
Step 6: Be prepared to adapt test instructions to facilitate comprehension of the task
procedures. Many test instructions are unnecessarily complex and use complicated
vocabulary or long, grammatically complex sentences. If sufficient practice items
are not available, extra items may be prepared so that actual test items are reserved
for the evaluation of performance.

Step 7: Interpret test results in light of altered administration procedures. The

assessment report should include information about any non-standardized
procedures used. Importantly, these problems may become less ambiguous at
later periods.

 TREATMENT OF MEMORY:

The typical recipients of memory rehabilitation are children and adults with
communication disorders. The most common targets of memory rehabilitation are
deficits in episodic anterograde memory, i.e. the ability to consciously retrieve
newly learned information after several minutes have passed.

With respect to anterograde memory rehabilitation, historically there have been 2

general approaches

 Restoration or retraining often using drill work

 Compensation with internal or external devices or environmental
modifications

 Memory retraining approaches: Memory retraining approaches are based

on the theory that stimulation of memory will induce recovery, analogous to
improvements in physical function with exercise. Many studies have shown,
however the practice on explicit memory tasks does not improve
performance. An alternative to memory drills is to attempt to increase
encoding of new information. This approach is based on the finding that
increasing the depth and quality of encoding may facilitate storage in LTM.
Eg: If you want teach a word, then describe it with the particular personality
or things which can be associated with. This type of strategy assumes that
retrieval failures are related to impaired coding processes rather than
ineffective search strategies.
  Memory compensation strategies: This mainly deals with the aids. Memory
aids can be classified as:
 Internal aids
 External aids

Internal aids include the use of mnemonic devices (eg: using a rhyme to remember
the number of days in a month), self-talk (eg: ‘I need to check my work’) or
visualization.

External aids sometimes, referred to as “cognitive prostheses” include note books,

computers and other electronic aids and environmental manipulations that help
structure information at encoding facilitate recall.

In general, there is a little evidence for the efficacy of internal aids, probably
because of the added cognitive burden placed on patients with the use of such aids.
By contrast, several researchers reported long term success with external aids,
including palmtop computers, memory notebooks, and computerized forms.
Research has shown that success with external memory aids appears to be
enhanced when the principles of applied behaviour are incorporated. That is, the
clinicians should carefully observe behaviour, select techniques that fit the
performance characteristics of a particular patient and his/her environment, plan
for generalization.

 Implicit learning and memory approaches: It has been long recognized

that the patients with memory impairments are capable of acquiring a
variety of motor, perceptual and cognitive skills when:

✓ Acquisition is not dependent on conscious awareness

✓ Learning is highly surface feature and context dependent
✓ The probability of a response occurring is determined by prior
experience phenomenon referred to as ‘repetition priming’. The
cognitive process exploited by these conditions is procedural or
‘implicit’ memory, or memory that does not require conscious
awareness of past occurrence but is simply expressed through the
changes in behaviour.

Principles of implicit learning also have been incorporated into a treatment

program known as spaced retrieval (SR). In this method, the patients must repeat
to-be-remembered information at progressively longer intervals like the method of
vanishing cues, SR capitalizes on repetition priming.

Eg: the patients have been trained to remember to check the schedules and message
boards, so that they retrain the habit of checking, even though the content of what
they are checking may change.

 MEMORY DEFICITS IN VARIOUS LANGUAGE (OR)

COMMUNICATION DISORDERS:

The communication disordered population has various memory problems, the type
and the severity of the memory deficits varies across the clinical groups. Some of
the clinical groups which exhibit memory problems are as follows:

 Memory deficits in learning disabled (LD)

 Memory deficits in autism spectrum disorder (ASD)
 Memory deficits in mental retardation (MR)
 Memory deficits in hearing impaired (HI)
 Memory deficits in ADHD

 Memory deficits in learning disabled (LD):

The National Joint Committee for Learning Disabilities (NJCLD) defines the term
learning disability as “…a heterogeneous group of disorders manifested by
significant difficulties in the acquisition and use of listening, speaking, reading,
writing, reasoning or mathematical abilities. These disorders are intrinsic to the
individual and presumed to be due to CNS dysfunction. Even though, an LD may
occur concomitantly with other handicapping conditions (eg: sensory impairment,
mental retardation, social and emotional disturbance) or environmental influences
(eg: cultural differences, insufficient/inappropriate instruction, psychogenic
factors). It is not the direct result of those conditions or influences”.

The National Dissemination Center for Children with Disabilities (NICHY) states
that the LDs fall into broad categories based on the 4 stages of information
processing used in learning; input, intergration, storage & output.
Input: This is the information perceived through the senses, such as visual and
auditory perception. Difficulties with the visual perception can cause problems
with recognizing the shape, position and size of items seen. There can be the
problems with sequencing, which can relate to deficits with the processing time
intervals or temporal perception. Difficulties with auditory perception can make it
difficult to screen out competing sounds in order to focus on one of them, such as
the sound of the teacher’s voice. Some children appear to be unable to process
tactile input. For eg: they may seem insensitive to pain or dislike being touched.

Integration: This is the stage during which the perceived input is interpreted,
categorized, placed in a sequence, or related to previous learning. Students with the
problems in these areas may be unable to tell a story in the correct sequence,
unable to memorize the sequences of information such as the days of the week,
able to understand a new concept but be unable to generalize it to other areas of
learning, or able to learn facts but be unable to put the facts together to see the ‘big
picture’. A poor vocabulary may contribute to the problems with comprehension.

Storage: Problems with memory can occur with the short-term or working
memory, or with the LTM. Most memory difficulties occur in the area of STM,
which can make it difficult to learn new material without many more repetitions
than is usual. Difficulties with the visual memory can impede learning to spell.

Output: Information comes out of the brain either through words, (i.e) language
output, or through muscle activity, such as gesturing, writing or drawing.
Difficulties with the language output can create problems with the spoken
language. For eg: answering a question to demand, in which one must retrieve
information from storage, organize our thoughts, and put the thoughts into words
before we speak. It can also cause trouble with the written language for the same
reasons. Difficulties with motor abilities can cause the problems with gross and
fine motor skills. People with gross motor difficulties may be clumsy, (i.e) they
may be prone to stumbling, falling, or bumping into things. They also may have
trouble running, climbing or learning to ride a bicycle. People with small motor
difficulties may have trouble buttoning shirts, tying shoelaces or with handwriting.

Specific learning disabilities: Deficits in any area of information processing can

manifest in a variety of the specific learning disabilities.
 o Reading disability (ICD-9 and DSM-IV codes F81.0/315.00) o
Writing disability (ICD-9 and DSM-IV codes F81.1/315.2) o Math
disability (ICD-9 and DSM-IV codes F81.2-3/315.1) o Non-verbal
learning disability (this disorder is not listed in the ICD-9) o Disorders
of speaking and listening

Difficulties that often co-occur with the learning disabilities include difficulty with
memory, social skills and executive functions (such as organizational skills and
time management). A variety of memory problems are evidenced in the learning
disabled. Some major categories of memory functions wherein these problems lie
are:

Receptive memory: This refers to the ability to note the physical features of a
given stimulus to be able to recognize it at a later time. The child who has
receptive processing difficulties invariably fails to recognize visual or auditory
stimuli such as the shapes or sounds associated with the letters of the alphabet, the
number system etc.

Sequential memory: This refers to the ability to recall stimuli in their order of
observation or presentation. Many dyslexics have poor visual sequential memory.
Naturally, this will affect their ability to read and spell correctly. After all, every
word consists of letters in a specific sequence. In order to read one has to perceive
the letters in sequence, and also remember what word is represented by that
sequence of letters. By simply changing the sequence of the letters in name, it can
become mean or amen. Some also have poor auditory sequential memory, and
therefore may be unable to repeat longer words orally without getting the syllabus
in the wrong order. For eg: the words like preliminary and statistical.

Rote memory: This refers to the ability to learn certain information as a habit
pattern. The child who has problems in this area is unable to recall with ease those
responses which should have been automatic, such as the alphabet, the number
system, multiplication tables, spelling rules and grammatical rules etc.

WM or STM: WM or STM lasts from a few seconds to a minute; the exact

amount of time may vary somewhat. When you are trying to recall a telephone
number that was heard a few seconds earlier, the name of a person who has just
been introduced, or the substance of the remarks just made by a teacher in a class,
you are calling on STM, or WM. You need this kind of memory to retain ideas and
thoughts when writing a letter, since you must be able to keep the last sentence in
mind as you compose the next. You also need this kind of memory when you work
on problems. Suppose a problem required that we first add 2 numbers together
(step 1: add 15+27) and next divide the sum (step 2: divide sum by 2). If we did
this problem in our heads, we would need to retain the result of step 1 (42)
momentarily, while we apply the next step (divide by 2). Some space in our WM is
necessary to retain the results of the step 1.

LTM: This refers to the ability to retrieve information of things learned in the past.
Until the LD develops adequate skills in recalling information, they will continue
to face each learning situation as though it is a new one. No real progress can be
attained by either the child or the teacher when the same ground has to be covered
over and over because the child has forgotten. It would appear that the most critical
need that the LD have is to be helped to develop an effective processing system for
remembering, because without it their performance will always remain at a level
much below what their capabilities indicate.

Strangely, though, while memory is universally considered a pre-requisite skill to

successful learning, attempts to delineate its process in the LD are few, and fewer
still are methods to systematically improve it.

The following is a list of memory deficits often noted in students with a learning
disability:

 Often doesn’t remember what was seen, heard or shown

 Has difficulty with remembering sequences in directions or instructions
 Often forgets the pronunciation of frequently used words, spelling is weak
 Sight vocabulary is weak and reading is often slow to develop
 Difficulty with the items that need to be memorized –facts, speeches, rhymes
etc
 Often appears forgetful
 Expressive and receptive language is weak
 Rarely uses appropriate nouns, refers to that thing, or you know
 Often repeats the same errors
Articles:

→ Nolan, John.D. & Driscoll, Rosemary L. (1978) studied memory storage

and retrieval in LD and normal children by matching for age and IQ at 2 age
levels (8-9 years & 11-12 years). They concluded that the normal children
performed so much better than LD children that the recall of the young
normals and the older LD children was virtually indistinguishable.

→ Goldstein, David, Golding & Jonathan (1984) did a study on meta-memory

ability in LD children with and without a memory deficit. They studied
normal children (N=8) and 2 groups of 8 LD elementary grade children, one
with and one without a STM deficit, their study showed that meta-memory
was found to be deficient only in the subgroup of LD children with a STM
deficit (as indexed by poor performance on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale
for Children-Revised digit span subtest). LD children without this memory
deficit didn’t differ from normal children in meta-memory abilities.

→ Kramer JH, Knee K & Delis DC investigated verbal memory impairments in

dyslexics. This study used the California Verbal Learning Test-Children’s
Version (CVLT-C) to assess verbal learning in 57 dyslexic children and 114
controls matched for gender, age and WISC-R vocabulary score. 3 areas of
verbal memory were investigated: Recall and recognition, use of learning
strategies, and interference effects. The dyslexic group learned the list items
more slowly, recalled fewer words on the last learning trial and the delayed
trails, and performed less well on the recognition condition. Dyslexics and
controls displayed similar vulnerability to interference, but group differences
were evident in serial position effects. Taken together, the data suggest that
the dyslexics have less efficient rehearsal and encoding mechanisms,
resulting in deficient encoding of new information, but normal retention and
retrieval.

→ Tam E. O’Shaughnessy & H. Lee Swanson (1998) studied immediate

memory deficits in students with the LD. The purpose of this study was to
synthesize research that directly compares children with and without LDs in
reading on immediate memory performance. 41 studies were included in the
 synthesis, which involved 161 effect sizes. The overall mean effect size
estimate in favour of the children without LDs in reading was -0.61
(SD=0.87). Effect size estimates were submitted to a descriptive and a
weighted least-square regression analysis. Results from the full regression
model indicated that the children with LDs were distinctly disadvantaged
compared to average readers when memory manipulations required the
naming of visual information and task conditions involved serial recall. Age,
IQ, and reading scores were not significant predictors of effect size
estimates. Most importantly, non-strategic (type of task and materials) rather
than strategic factors best predicted effect size estimates. The results also
indicated that the memory difficulties of readers with LDs persisted across
age, suggesting that a deficit model best captures the performance of
children with LDs.

→ Elbert (1984) has provided evidence that the LD and non-LD are comparable
at the encoding stage of word recognition, but that LD children require more
time to understand a memory search.

→ Swan reported that the LD children had no deficiency in rehearsal but

instead showed a failure to perform elaborative processing of each word.
Concerning retrieving information from LTM, LD children can use
organized strategies for selecting retrieval cues and different word attribute
to guide interval. They appear to select less efficient strategies, conduct a
less exhaustive search for retrieval cues and lack self checking skills in the
selection of retrieval cues. Thus, in conclusion, all the above studies reveals
LD children show various kinds of memory deficits ranging in varying
severity.

 Memory deficits in autism spectrum disorders (ASD):

ASD refers to a group of neurodevelopmental disorders, characterized by deficits

mainly in 3 domains viz; 1) social interaction, 2) verbal & non-verbal
communication and, 3) repetitive behaviours or interests.
In addition, they will often have unusual responses to sensory experiences such as
certain sounds or the way objects look. Each of these symptoms runs the gamut
from mild to severe. They will present in each individual child differently. For
instance, a child may have little trouble learning to read but exhibit extremely poor
social interaction. Each child will display communication, social, and behavioural
patterns that are individual but fit into the overall diagnosis of ASD.

Research works have shown that the children with ASD have impaired memory
processes. Children with ASD exhibit various memory deficits on a varying range
depending on the type and severity of the ASD. Eg: some may show deficits in
STM, some in LTM, whereas some may have problems in remembering faces.
Thus, the memory deficits vary across the subgroups of ASD.

An individual’s perceptual register blocks the repetitive stimuli (like the traffic
noise), allowing the conscious brain to focus on more important things. This
process is called perceptual filtering and all of us are largely consciously aware of
it. Autism is believed to occur when an individual is unable to filter sensory
information. This sensory overload is like living inside a pin ball machine, and the
brain responds by blocking all of it.

Articles:

→ Angela Garcia O’Shea et al (2005) explored source memory in children wih

ASDs. This study investigated the specific role of source memory in autism.
Children with ASD were compared to a chronological and mental
agematched comparison group of typically developing children. Although
children with autism performed similarly to controls on a fact recognition
measure, their performance on a source memory task was significantly
lower. The findings indicated that the nature of the source memory
confusion in children with autism doesn’t appear to reflect a generalized
deficit in attaching context to memories but rather is dependent on the
specific to-be-remembered information that, in this study, involves social
aspects of context.

→ Maggie Bruck et al studied autobiographical memory and suggestibility in

children with ASD. Children with ASD (N=30) and typically developing
chronological age-matched children (N=38) ranging in the age from 5 to 10
 years were administered an ABM questionnaire. The results from both
paradigms revealed that the children with ASD showed poorer ABM
compared to controls. Generally, their ABM was marked by errors of
omission rather than by the errors off commission, and memory was
particularly poor for early-life events. In addition, they were as suggestible
as the typically developing children.

→ McCrory et al studied (J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2007 May; 48) eye

witness memory and suggestibility in children with Asperger Syndrome. In
this study, a live classroom event was used to investigate eye-witness recall
and suggestibility in children with Asperger Syndrome (AS group; N=24)
and typically developing children [(TD) group; N=27]. All the participants
were aged between 11 and 14 years and were interviewed using a structured
protocol. 2 measures of executive functioning were also administered.
Results suggested that the AS group were found to be no more suggestible
and no less accurate than their peers. Free recall elicited less information,
including gist, in the AS group. TD, but not AS, the participants tended to
focus on the socially salient aspects of the scene in their free recall. Both
general and specific questioning elicited similar numbers of new details in
both groups. Significant correlations were found between memory recall and
executive functioning performance in the AS group only. The present study
indicates that children with AS can act as reliable witnesses but they may be
more reliant on questioning to facilitate recall. Our findings also provide
evidence for poor gist memory. It is speculated that such differences stem
from weak central coherence and lead to a reliance on generic cognitive
processes, such as executive functions, during recall.

 Memory deficits in Mental Retardation (MR):

Mental Retardation (MR) refers to significantly sub-average general intellectual

functioning resulting in or associated with the concurrent impairments in adaptive
behaviour and manifested during the developmental period.

The definition includes essentially 3 components. They are:

  Significantly sub-average general intellectual functioning
 Deficits in adaptive behaviour
 Manifested during developmental period Characteristics of MR:

O Physical: With the exception of specific genetic syndromes (eg: Down

syndrome) and certain additional handicapping conditions, such as Cerebral Palsy,
there are no specific physical characteristics that distinguish the population with
MR from the general population. While most individuals diagnosed with the MR
do not necessarily have distinguishing physical characteristics, many do have
obvious physical abnormalities including unsteady gait, scoliosis, oro-facial
abnormalities and hypotonicity.

O Behavioural: With the following exceptions, there are no specific behavioural

characteristics that are common to all individuals with MR: (a) those
characteristics previously described as associated with the brain damage; (b)
affection seeking and stubbornness that are sometimes associated with the Down
syndrome and; (c) behaviours associated with the emotional and psychological
problems that sometimes accompany retardation.

O Intellectual: It is the area of intellectual or learning deficits that engenders the

term MR. The previous description of intelligence should aid in the understanding
of these deficits (i.e) these deficits occur in the areas of acquiring knowledge,
storing knowledge and using this stored knowledge in various situations. One of
the striking features seen in MR group is their memory deficit.

Most of the studies have quoted that the short memory is affected to a large extent
in the MR group. The development of the cognitive domain and its function is
restricted in case of MR due to which even though, there is some amount of
cognitive skills exhibited by the MR individuals, it is not always age appropriate.

Articles:

→ Brock J, Jarrold C (J Child Psychol Psychiatry 46 (3):304-316, 2005

March) studied serial order reconstruction in Down syndrome. 26 Down
syndrome individuals with MR and 32 TD children were tested on a digit
reconstruction task in which the participants were presented with auditory
digit sequences and responded by pressing the corresponding digits on a
touch-screen in the correct serial order. Background measures were
 performance on a closely matched visuo-spatial reconstruction task, reaction
time on a simple digit identification task, receptive vocabulary age and
nonverbal ability (Raven’s matrices). Participants were also tested on a
conventional digit recall task. Results showed that all the 4 background
measures accounted for significant individual variation in digit
reconstruction performance, but there remained a significant effect of group
that reflected relatively poor performance of individuals with Down
syndrome. The results provide strong evidence that the Down syndrome is
associated with a selective deficit in verbal STM and a deficit in verbal serial
order memory in particular.

→ Seung, H-K & Chapman, R.S. studied sentence memory in MR and TD

children. This study evaluated the Baddeley model’s claim that the verbal
STM deficits might arise from slower speaking rates by using the sentence
memory subtest of the Stanford-Binet. 30 individuals with DS were
compared to 2 control groups [non-verbal MA-matched and Mean Length of
Utterance (MLU) –matched] on the sentence span and speaking rate for the
longest verbatim recalled sentence. Sentence stimuli were presented at a
normal speaking rate. Results show that the MR group had shorter sentence
memory span than the MA-matched group and a faster, rather than slower,
speaking rate (syllables per second) than the MLU-matched controls. Thus,
it can be concluded that the language production level accounted for a
substantial portion of the variance in the sentence memory span in the MR
group. Thus, the language production skill, rather than speaking rate,
predicts variability in the verbal memory span.

→ A study was done on verbal STM deficits in Down syndrome by

Christopher Jarrold et al (Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry
41(2): 233-244, 2000 Feb). 2 experiments are presented here which look for
the markers of rehearsal in children with Down syndrome and verbal mental
age-matched controls. Both experiments confirm that the individuals with
Down syndrome show poorer verbal STM performance than controls.
However, they rule out rehearsal as an explanation of these deficits because
the evidence suggests that neither individuals with Down syndrome nor
matched controls are engaging in spontaneous sub-vocal rehearsal.
 → The study done by Carlesimo GA et al (Neuropsychologia
35(1):7179,1997) investigated the LTM in MR. This study aimed at
investigating LTM functioning in Down’s syndrome subjects (DS) as
compared to the individuals with MR of different etiology and mental age-
matched normal children (MA). For this purpose, tests of verbal and visuo-
perceptual explicit memory and a verbal repetition priming task were
administered to 15 DS, 15 MR and 30 MA subjects. Results document
comparable verbal priming in the 3 groups. As for explicit memory, normal
children performed better than MR individuals and these, in turn, better than
DS subjects. Compared to MR subjects, DS subjects were particularly
deficient in organizing verbal material according to its categorical structure
and in actively retrieving stored information. These results support a view
positing heterogeneity of neuropsychological deficits across distinct etiology
MR groups.

→ Vicari S et al investigated verbal and spatial STM abilities in persons with

Down’s syndrome (DS) and intellectual disability (ID) of different etiology.
For this purpose, we compared performances of DS subjects (n=15; mean
mental age=5.2 years; SD=1.2 years; mean chronological age=16.6 years;
SD=2.9 years) and ID subjects (n=14; mean mental age=5.8 years; SD=2.1
years; mean chronological age=16.4 years; SD=2.5 years) with those of
normally developed subjects matched for mental age (n=24) on tasks of
forward and backward immediate recall of verbal and spatial sequences.
Altogether, our data documents a deficit of verbal and spatial backward
spans in persons with DS. The results showed that the DS group exhibited
deficits of verbal and spatial backward spans, confirming the hypothesis that
ID is not a uniform condition, but rather than it is characterized by a deficit
in a complex cognitive system in which some cognitive abilities can be
disrupted more than others (Detterman 1987; Vicari et al 1992).

 Memory deficits in hearing impaired (HI):

By definition, children with HI have hearing levels greater than 25 dBHL in at least
one ear. HI as defined by degree of hearing loss is a continuum that spans better
ear pure tone average from 0 dBHL to greater than 110 dBHL (children with
minimal audiometrically measurable hearing).

Memory plays a significant role in communication. As STM, it is important for

hearing, speaking, speech reading, writing and reading, because it is difficult to
continue with the communication if we are unaware of what we have just been
expressing, or what has been expressed to us. In case of HI, the problem is at the
sensory level (i.e. audition), so HI population has problems mostly in storing
information in the STM and retrieving them when required.

 Memory codes
 Memory encoding Memory codes:

In a study of short term (Blair 1957), severely and profoundly deaf children were
assessed on the memory for Designs test and the Knox cube test, for which the
order of stimuli has to be recalled. The deaf children performed at a significantly
higher level on these tests than hearing children matched for age, gender and
intelligence. They also performed better, but not significantly so, on a test of object
location, where they had to remember the position of everyday objects on a card.

Conrad (1979) set out to investigate the operation of sequential memory, which is
the order in which the items are organized in memory, and the use of memory
codes, in a large of deaf school leavers. The children were shown printed words,
one at a time, and asked to write down from memory in the right order. Stimulus
trials used either homophone words or non-homophone words. The effect of
hearing loss was than that of intelligence. By adjusting the scores for intelligence,
and by classifying the children with a separate for the ability to use internal speech,
Conrad showed that the hearing loss had a negligible effect on performance.

Memory encoding:

The usual encoding mechanism is that of rehearsal, the recounting or repetition of

the material as it is held in STM, before it is transferred into longer term mental
storage. Several reports have described the use of rehearsal in recall tasks by deaf
children. The general finding has been that the type of rehearsal is related to the
preferred method of communication. Orally well educated tend to use verbal
rehearsal, students used the Rochester method employing finger spelling, and
signed rehearsal is used by students in sign language and TC programs.
Although deaf children encode in the mode of their familiar modality of
communication, there is evidence of flexibility to use other methods depending
upon the experience.

Articles:

→ Hamilton & Holzman (1989) showed that the individuals can encode
flexibly in short memory, with the code of being biased by the properties of
the incoming stimuli; oral manual or both modalities. Subjects with both
speech and sign experience recalled simultaneous oral and manual
expressions more readily than expressions presented manually or orally,
suggesting enhanced encoding of as a result of linguistic experience. The
total linguistic experience affected recall accuracy rather than the selection
of the code.

→ Bebko (1984) reported findings which cast light on rehearsal strategies in

severe to profound congenitally deaf children aged 5-15 years. 29 of these
children were educated orally and 34 were educated by TC. Following the
presentation of various colour stimuli, there was a 25 second delay. This
delay interval was either unfilled, allowing spontaneous rehearsal or the
children were induced to rehearse by demonstration, or were prevented from
rehearsal by counting digits. As expected, the orally educated children
tended to rehearse verbally, while those educated by TC rehearsed in sign.
Both types of spontaneous rehearsal seemed to be equally effective.
Although the serial position patterns in spontaneous rehearsal (first/mid/last)
were similar to those of hearing children, they were delayed in performance
level by several years for both orally and TC educated children, a delay
attributed to impaired linguistic and educational experience. When recall
was prevented or induced, the deaf recalled as well as, or better than, the
hearing children. Thus, the memory and rehearsal spans of deaf children
were at least as good as that of the hearing children.

→ Paul Arnold & Craig Murray (Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Vol

27 (4) July 1998) studied memory for faces and objects by deaf and hearing
signers and hearing non-signers. The memory of 11 deaf and 11 hearing
 British sign language users and 11 hearing non-signers for pictures of faces
of and verbalizable objects was measured using the game Concentration.
The 3 groups performed at the same level for the objects. In contrast, the
deaf signers were better for faces than the hearing signers, who in turn were
superior to the hearing non-signers, who were the worst. 3 hypotheses were
made: That there would be no significant difference in terms of the number
of attempts between the 3 groups on the verbalization object task, that the
hearing and deaf signers would demonstrate superior performance to that of
the hearing non-signers on the matching faces task, and that the hearing and
deaf signers would exhibit similar performance levels on the matching faces
task. The first 2 hypotheses were supported but the third was not. Deaf
signers were found to be superior for memory for faces to hearing signers
and hearing non-signers.

→ Clark & Diane (1989) investigated both the iconic and STM of deaf
individuals. Initially, iconic memory was investigated using both familiar
and unfamiliar stimuli. Results showed that the deaf subjects (n=8) didn’t
have deficits in visual perceptual abilities but had deficits in their linguistic
skills. Deaf subjects also showed a practice effect with the familiar stimuli,
an effect not found among the hearing subjects (n=8). In a serial position
recall task deaf subjects were found to have lower levels of recall at all of
the serial positions than did hearing subjects. Deaf subjects also didn’t show
a significant recency effect. While results show that the deaf and hearing
subjects have comparable levels of skill in their visual information
processing strategies, it would appear that the 2 groups use different kinds of
input strategies that may not be optimally suited for recall of sequential
information.

 Memory deficits in ADHD:

ADHD is now one of the most commonly diagnostic conditions of childhood.

Barkley defined ADHD as “ADHD consists of developmental deficiencies in the
regulation and maintenance of behaviour by rules and consequences. These
deficiencies give rise to problems with inhibiting, or sustaining responses to tasks
or stimuli and adhering to rules or instructions, particularly in situations where
the consequences for such behaviour are delayed, weak or non-existent”.
DSM-IV separated the diagnostic criteria into 2 domains; inattention and
hyperactivity/impulsivity. The 2 domains yielded 3 subtypes of ADHD:
predominantly hyperactive-impulsive (HI), predominantly inattentive (IA) and a
combined type. ADHD is now viewed as a neurologically based condition with
primary deficits in discourse organization, inferring and monitoring that are related
to their executive functions and WM deficits. Research has shown that persons
with HI and combined types of ADHD exhibit deficits in executive functioning
and WM.

Executive functioning:

Converging evidence from clinical, neurobiologists and neuropsychological studies

suggests that the surface behavioural manifestations in ADHD reflect an

underlying problem in executive function. Executive function refers t

selfregulatory behaviours that are necessary to select and sustain actions and guide
the behaviour within the context of goals and rules. Executive functioning involves
developing and implementing an approach to performing a task that is not
habitually performed. One must initiate, plan, shift attention or thought, organize,
inhibit inappropriate thought or behaviour and sustain the necessary sequence of
behaviour. Prior conceptualizations of ADHD as a primary problem of attention or
impulsivity are losing their explanatory and prescriptive power and are being
replaced with constructs, including poor self regulation, particularly behaviour
inhibition and WM deficits that underlie executive functioning. In such accounts,
rather than being distracted, the child fails to follow through on rules when
presented with competing, highly rewarding activities.

Behavioural inhibition provides the critical support for executive functioning.

Barkley proposed that the individuals with ADHD have difficulty in inhibiting
behaviour. Several tasks such as The Stroop colour and word test, Wisconsin Card
Sorting Test, Trial Making Tests have been used to evaluate executive functioning,
although the performance on these tasks is associated with advancing age in
children and adolescents, children and adults with ADHD exhibit poorer
performance than normals.

Working Memory (WM):

Executive functioning depends on WM, which involves short term storage as well
as processing, manipulation, and transformation of stored information. WM
includes nonverbal and verbal WM components. Nonverbal or spatial WM is the
capacity to hold events and information in mind so as to initiate complex
sequences of behaviours. Verbal WM is internalized language that is used to talk
with oneself to provide reflection, description, instruction, and questioning, which
in turn facilitate problem solving, the development of rules, and moral reasoning.
ADHD disrupts the development of internalization of speech because it disrupts
the inhibition needed to support internalized speech. Without internalized speech,
one will fail to develop appreciation of rule-governed behaviour and, without this,
one lacks self regulation. Deficits in verbal WM will contribute to difficulties in
regulating affect, motivation and arousal. Both verbal and nonverbal memories are
essential for problem solving that involves recombination of behavioural sequences
in hierarchical goal directed patterns.

Studies have shown that revealed that the children with language disabilities and
the children with ADHD exhibit deficits in WM. These WM deficits influence
children’s ability to learn new words, comprehend syntactically complex sentences
and organize the extended discourse.

 PERCEPTIONS (VISUOSPATIAL AND MOTION):

Perception:

The interpretation of the sense impression is known as perception. This perception

is very essential to deal with the object in the world around more effectively and
efficiently. It plays a very significant role in hearing, memory, thinking, reasoning
and emotion etc. Eg: perceiving dog as dog.

Let’s begin by imagining that you are driving alone quiet country road. You are
admiring the Snow-covered landscape when a train whistle breaks the silence.

Even though you are at some distance from the track, the sensory impact of the
train hits with the surprising force.

Now, a question is how do we perceive? On what process allowed us to experience

the powerful sensory effects of the train in these aspects?
The answer to this question is ‘energy’ we heard that the train is moving/running
that is the sound energy traveled from the train is to your ears and also we have
experienced about trains form/shape, colour and movement because the brain
reflected the patterns of light energy into your eyes.

Bruce Gold Stein (1996) suggested that there are 3 processes involved in
perception:

 The psychological aspects

 The cognitive process
 The stimulus

 The psychological aspects: The psychological aspects are how are the
properties of objects in the environment represented by activity in the
nervous system.

 The cognitive process: The cognitive process is the experience and prior
knowledge influence the perception.
 The stimulus: The stimulus is how we use information from the environment
to create perception.
Environmental Environmental
stimulus stimulus

Stimulus Cognitive
Perception
Psychological

Nervous system activity

Figure: Illustration of the Perception process

Advantages of the information provided by the movement including as follows:

• Movement in our perceptual vision usually triggers an eye movement that

brings the moving objects image on to our fovea, so we can see it clearly.
• The movement of an object relative to the observer provider information
about objects 3-dimensional shape. We may not be sure of an unfamiliar
object’s shape. If we see it from just one view point, but if it moves relative
to us or if we walk around it, its shape became obvious.

• Movement provided information that helps us to segregate figure from

ground.
• Movement provides information that enable us actively interact with an
environment. Eg: catching a ball in cricket match.

The brain and the perception: Each sense has a primary receiving area in the
cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the brain. The primary receiving area is the first
area in the cerebral cortex to receive the signal indicated by the sense receptors.
The primary receiving area for vision is the occipital lobe, for hearing it is the
temporal lobe and for the skin senses –touches, temperature and pain –it is in the
parietal lobe.

VISUOSPATIAL PERCEPTION: This is one component of Cognitive

functioning and is referred to our ability to process and interpret the visual
information about where objects are in space. This is an important aspect of
Cognitive functioning because it is responsible for a wide range of activities of
daily living. For instance, it underlines our ability to move in an environment and
orient ourselves appropriately.

Visuospatial perception is also involved in our ability to accurately reach for the
objects in our visual field and our ability to shift our gaze to different points in
space. The association areas of the visual cortex are separated into 2 major
component pathways and are believed to mediate different aspects of visual
cognition. In humans, the parieto-occipital region is believed to process
visuospatial and visual motion types of information. Conversely, the infra-temporal
region of the brain is believed to mediate our ability to process visual information
about the form and the colour of the objects.
 ✓ Properties of visual system: Basic to reading and word recognition. The
central importance is to the interpretation of study of visual perception with
respect to 3 parameters.

✓ Time, space and energy.

Temporal resolution: It has been observed that the individuals can perceive letters
that are for intervals as brief as 2-3 ms, possibly even less, but this result is
obtainable only if immediately following the response the field remain free of
interfering inputs for a critical intervals.

If another stimulus follows within this interval the change is not detected rather,
information concerning luminance relationship in the visual field is integrated in
such a way that the tradeoff between stimulus intensity and time is virtually
perfect. The critical interval of this tradeoff depends on the luminance of the target
stimuli and the background, but is typically of the order of 50-100 msec for
brightens discriminate and 200 msec or longer for form discrimination (including
letter recognition).

However, the upper limit is not sharp; the tradeoff function falls off gradually with
increasing exposure duration beyond the critical interval. A stimulus exposed for
only a few mile seconds may be effectively present for a much longer interval up
to a second or more under favourable condition.

Spatial resolution: When a stimulus such as printed letter is presented in the visual
field an image is projected on the retina. But the eye is unlike a camera that the
work of constructing an internal representation of the letter.

Retinal ganglion cells have receptive fields that are generally large relative to the
dimension typical of letter or enter letter spacing in visual displays, because the
number of ganglion cells is large and the receptive fields vary in size. Information
concerning the contours of a figure, such as a printed letters, can be gained by
integrating luminance difference over areas surrounding the contours.

This property of the system has 2 consequences of a particular importance of letter

perception:
  2 adjacent contours can be resolved by the system only if they are separated
by a minimum distance.
 The perceptibility of a contour is degraded if any form of visual noise (Eg:
random dots) appears within a distance of several degrees of visual angle.

MOTION PERCEPTION: Gordon Walls (1942) stated the movement is

intimately associated with life; the perception of this movement is intimately
associated with survival.

Advantages of the information provided by the movement including as follows:

 Movement in our peripheral vision usually triggers an eye movement that

brings the moving objects image onto our fovea, so we can see clearly.
 The movement of an object relative to observer provider information about
objects 3-dimensional shape. We may not be sure of an unfamiliar object’s
shape. If we see it from just one view point, but if it moves relative to us or
if we walk around it, its shape became obvious.
 Movement provided information that helps us to segregate figure from
ground.
 Movement provides information that enable us actively interact with an
environment. Eg: catching a ball in cricket match.

Studying movement perception:

Motion perception is similar to those we encountered when studying the other

perception qualities. On the other hand, we usually perceive movement effortlessly
and it seems that we can easily explain movement in terms of stimulus, such as
spotlight, that moves across the retina stimulating one receptor after another.

On the other hand, we perceive movement in many different situation in which the
stimulation is far more complex than a spot of light moving across the retina. The
complex examples are:

 A person walks across your field of view. In this case, you perceive not only
the person involving across your field of view, but also the person’s arms,
legs and body movement relative to each other.
  A series of light on a sign flash one after another. This is called stroboscopic
movement, which is a type of apparent movement, so called because the
movement is only apparent, not real.

Taking eye movements into account:

According to corollary discharge theory, the information about the observer’s eye
movement is provided by the signals generated when the observer moves, or tries
to move their eye (Gyp 1972 & Tember 1960). Let us consider how this theory
works, by following what happens in the circuit as shown in the figure above.
When an observer decides to move their eyes to the left, a motor signal (M) travels
from the motor area of the brain to the eye muscles causing the eyes to move to the
left. This eye movement causes the image of whatever is in the observed view to
move across the retina and this movement of the image across the retina results in a
sensory movement signal(s) in the optic nerve.

BRAIN
MOTOR SENSORY

If the sensory movement signal reaches the context, it will cause the observer to
perceive movement. But in this example, the scene is not moving. Only the eyes
have moved. It is here that the corollary discharge comes into play. The corollary
discharge (C) is a copy of the motor signal that is transmitted to the comparator – a
hypothetical structure that receives both the corollary discharge and the sensory
movement signal and informs it that the eye has received a signal to move left.
When the corollary discharge reaches the comparator, it cancels the sensory
movement signals and prevents it from reaching cortex, so we see no movement in
the scene.

According to this model, we will see movement when:

 Just the sensory movement signal is sent to the comparator or

 Just the corollary discharge is sent to the comparator but if both reach the
comparator together, they cancel each other, and we see no movement. This
model has been tested by determining whether the movement perception
does, in fact, occur when only the corollary discharge reaches the
comparator. This has been accomplished in the following 4 ways, 3 of which
you can experience for yourself.

1) By observing an after image as you move your eyes in a dark room: Why
does the after image appear to move your eyes? The answer cannot be that an
image is moving across your retina, because the circle’s image always
remains at the same place on the retina without movement of the stimulus
across the retina. There is no sensory movement of the signal. However, a
corollary discharge is generated by the signals sent from your brain to your
eye muscles, and since the corollary discharge is not cancelled by a sensory
movement signal, you see the after image move as your eyes move.

2) By pushing on your eyeball while keeping your eye steady:

Why do you see movement when you push on your eyeball? According to
Lawrene, Stark & Bruce Bridgman (1983), when you push on your eyeball
while keeping your eye fixed on a particular point, your eyes remain
stationary because your eye muscles are pushing against the tone of finger
so you can maintain steady fixation on the point. The signal sent to the eye
muscles to hold the eye in place creates a corollary discharge, and since
there is no sensory movement signal to cancel it, we see movement.
(Bridgeman & Stark 1997)

3) By following a moving object with your eyes:

Let’s consider how the corollary discharge theory explains the perception of
movement in the most normal situation in which an observer follows a
moving car, the car image remains stationary on the observer’s retina and no
sensory movement signals occurs. But since the eyes are moving a corollary
discharge reaches the comparator, this signal is not cancelled by a sensory
movement signal, so the observer perceives the car to be moving. As to the
 rest of the scene, its image sweeps across the observers retinas as she
follows the car with her eyes. This moving image generates a sensory
movement signal which is cancelled by a corollary discharge generated by
the observer’s eye movements, so she perceives the rest of the scene as
stationary.

4) By paralyzing an observer’s eye muscles and having the observer by to

move his eyes:
In this situation, when the observer tries to move his eyes, the motor signal
sent to the eye muscles results in the corollary discharge, but since the
paralyzed eye remains stationary, there is no stationary movement signal. In
such an experiment (Stevens et al 1976) was temporarily immobilized by a
paralytic drug injected into his circulation. When Stevens tried to move his
eyes the scene in front of him appeared to drop to a new position, just as
predicted by the corollary discharge model. [Martin et al 1982 for another
paralysis experiment]

Corollary discharge theory explains many of the facts of movement perception and
has also been supported by some physiological evidence. Cells have been found in
the monkey’s superior colliculus that increase their firing rate when the eye is
stationary and a bar is swept across the cells receptive field but that decrease their
firing rate when it moves across a stationary bar (632 Robinson & Wartz 1976).

Note that, in both cases, the bar was in the receptive field, but that when the eye is
stationary, the cell fires, and when the eye is moving the cell does not fire. This
result can be explained by corollary discharge theory as follows:

When the eye is stationary, the bar moves across the cells receptive field, and since
the resulting movement signal is not cancelled by a corollary discharge, the cell
fires. However, when the eye moves, the sensory movement signal generated when
the bar sweeps across the receptive field is cancelled by the corollary discharge
generated by the eye movement and the cell does not fire.

In more recent research, Jenn Rene Duhamel, Carol Colby & Michael Goldberg
(1992) found neurons in the monkey’s parietal cortex that fire just before the
monkey makes an eye movement; perhaps the neurons such as these provide
information about eye movements required by the corollary discharge theory.

The corollary discharge theory describes a possible physiological mechanism to

explain how the visual system might take eye movements into account to
determine whether the objects that create an image on the retina are stationary or
moving.

 VISUOSPATIAL WORKING MEMORY (vsWM):

Visuospatial working memory/short-term memory (vsWM/STM) is the temporary

retention of goal-relevant visuospatial information through the persistent brain
activity (Goldman-Rakic, 1995). vsWM is a basic human cognitive function. Brain
is able to perform these tasks because there are neurons that are active during the
time that you keep things in memory.

The brain loci of the persistent activity that enables retention of information in
vsWM are most likely the intraparietal sulcus (IPS; Todd & Marois, 2004; Xu &
Chun 2006), a parietal brain region, and the frontal eye field (FEF; Courtney et al
1998 & Curtis 2006), a frontal region.

A basic feature of the vsWM brain network is its limited capacity. vsWM capacity
is the maximum number of memories that can be stored.

Generally, only around 4 memories can be held in vsWM simultaneously (Cowan

2001; Todd & Marois, 2004; Xu & Chun 2006), although the exact number
depends on the method of the measurement and the task performed.

Because of the limited capacity, it is very important to only allow goal-relevant

information to enter the fronto-parietal vsWM retention network. (Vogel et al
2005)

The single most important of these factors seems to be controlled attention 3

reflected through activity in the brain regions such as the dorso-lateral pre-frontal
cortex (dIPFC; Miller & Cohen 2001; dIPFC; Kane & Engle 2002), and controlled
attention is often included in the concept of the working memory (WM). This
distinguishes STM & WM.
In addition, vsWM is involved in several of the cognitive deficits associated with
the diagnoses such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder [ADHD; Westerberg
et al, 2004].

vsWM is not static and not the same in every person. vsWM improves during
childhood, peaks during adulthood, and deteriorates during old age (Jenkins et al,
1999; Fry & Hale, 2000; Klingberg et al, 2002; Gathercole et al, 2004). Thus, there
is plasticity in the brain to which it can be linked.

 ROLES OF MEMORY IN SPEECH LANGUAGE PATHOLOGY:

SLPs are the most commonly associated with the speech therapies, but the role of
an SLP covers a variety of conditions. SLPs are vital to the development of
therapies for the treatment of the cognitive disorders.

SLPs are knowledgeable about normal and abnormal development, brainbehaviour

relationships, pathophysiology, and neuropsychological processes as related to the
cognitive aspects of communication. Their educational and clinical background
prepares SLPs to assume a variety of roles related to the facilitation and
rehabilitation of individuals with cognitive-communication disorders.

Appropriate roles for SLPs include but are not limited to the following:

1) Identification:
Identifying individuals at risk or presenting with the
cognitivecommunication disorders.

2) Assessment:
a) Selecting and implementing clinically, culturally, and linguistically
appropriate approaches to assessment and diagnosis, using both static
and dynamic procedures.
b) Identifying contextual factors that contribute to or can be used to
ameliorate cognitive communication disorders.

3) Intervention:
Selecting and implementing clinically, culturally, and linguistically
appropriate and evidence-based approaches to intervention (Eg: training
discrete cognitive processes, teaching specific functional skills, developing
 compensatory strategies and support systems, providing caregiver training,
and providing counselling and behavioural support services).

4) Counselling:
Providing culturally and linguistically appropriate counselling for
individuals and their significant others about cognitive-communication
disorders and their impact.

5) Collaboration:
Collaborating with the individual with a cognitive-communication disorder,
family members, teachers and other professional colleagues, care providers,
and others in developing and implementing assessment and intervention
plans.
6) Case management:
Serving as case manager, service coordinator, or team leader by
coordinating, monitoring, and ensuring the appropriate and timely delivery
of a comprehensive management plan.

7) Education:
a) Developing curricula and educating, supervising, and mentoring
future SLPs in assessment and treatment options and other issues
related to the cognitive-communication disorders.
b) Educating families, caregivers, and other professionals regarding the
needs of the individuals with cognitive-communication disorders.

8) Prevention:
Educating the public on the prevention of the factors contributing to
cognitive-communication disorders.

9) Advocacy:
a) Advocating for the services for individuals with
cognitivecommunication disorders.
b) Serving as an expert witness.

10) Research:
 Advancing the knowledge base on cognitive-communication disorders and
their treatment through research activities.

 ATTENTION WITH TYPES AND DEVELOPMENT:

 INTRODUCTION:
Take a moment to pay attention to your attention process. Close your eyes and try
notice energy sound that is reaching your auditory system. Now, continue to pay
attention to those sounds and keep your eyes open, simultaneously expanding your
attention to include visual stimuli. If you can manage this task, continue to include
additional stimuli, specifically those that involve touch, smell and task. You will
discover that you cannot attend to everything at once.

Attention is the major area of investigation within education, psychology,

neuroscience and neuropsychology. Attention has also been referred to as the
allocation of processing resources. Attention is defined as the act or state of
applying the mind to an activity.

Attention is a complex array of cognitive behavioural processes involved in the

reduction and selection of information and in behavioural response control.
Arousal is the initial stage of attention. For attention to occur the organism should
be in a general physiologic state of response/readiness called arousal. Attention is
the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on one aspect of environment
while ignoring other things (Strayer, Drews & Johnson, 2003).

Clifford (2008) defined that the attention enables us to process information about
the outside world and it also requires perception or recognition of sensory input to
occur.

In infant psycho-physiological research, attention is used in the 2 aspects of

behaviour:

Selective recognition response: In recognition tests, after an infant becomes

familiar with a stimulus, a novel stimulus is presented along with the familiar
stimulus. Then, the preference is found for the novel stimulus. This requires
attention.

Depth of processing of stimuli: Fixation of a stimulus accompanied by heart rate

decrease indicated more intense scanning than a fixation of an equal length without
a cardiac change.

Attention can refer to the kind of concentration on a mental task in which people
try to exclude other interfering stimuli –for eg: when taking an examination.
Attention can refer to being prepared for further information –for eg: when
someone tells you to pay attention to an important announcement. Attention also
refers to receiving several messages at once and ignoring all but one –for eg: when
you focus on one conversation at a noisy party. Attention is a concentration of
mental activity. The topic of attention has varied in its popularity throughout the
history of psychology. It intrigued the introspectionists in Europe.

The ability to focus selectively on a selected stimulus, sustaining that focus and
shifting it at will the ability to concentrate (William James 1890). In the US,
William James (1890) speculated about the number of ideas that could be attended
at only one time.

Hirst (1986) - Attention was regarded as such a hidden process that was not a
legitimate area for the scientific study.

For attention to occur, the organism must be in general physiological state of

readiness called arousal which is the first stage of attention along with the
perception. Perception is the recognition of the sensory input. Attention capacity
or information processing capacity is the amount of information that can be
attended at any one time. Attention control is the process of guiding or directing
this attention capacity when it is needed. This control may be automatic in process
while doing over learned tasks or may be controlled processing, which is used for
novel or complex stimuli (conscious processing).

Neuroanatomy and neurophysiology of attention states that many areas in brain

activate when attention process is happening it is equal in both left and right
hemispheres for both internal representation stimulus and external representation
stimulus.
  NEURAL CORRELATES OF ATTENTION:

Attention involves 3 major functional states:

 Orienting to sensory stimuli

 Executive functions
 Maintaining the alertive state

 Maintaining to sensory stimuli: Involves the posterior structures such as the

parietal lobe, pulvinar and superior colliculus.

 Executive functions: Located more anteriorly and includes frontal midline

areas and Basal Ganglia.

 Maintaining the alertive state: Controlled by brain vigilance network

operating through the norepinepherine system arising in the locus ceruleus.

(Posner & Peterson, 1990)

Attention state of an individual is determined by the activity of neurons. Attention

directed towards a particular external stimuli, is often reflected in an enhancement
of sensory response to the stimulus. This enhancement is spatially selective for
neurons in many areas and especially the eye movement. In case of internal stimuli
representation, attention is associated with a prolongation of neural activity. These
modulations neuronal responses show dynamic nature of neural processing. While
summarizing research indicates that most of the experiments show that the neural
responses are enhanced even if the physical characteristics remain the same.

Reticular formation is associated with general arousal which moderates sensory

threshold, muscle tone and various responses. Cortico-cortical system of prefrontal
cortex actively participates in attention. It also helps in executions and planning of
various functions. It is also important for the movement of eyes, head and whole
body, for attending stimuli.

 TYPES OF ATTENTION:
According to Sohlberg & Mateer (1987, 2001), Clinical Taxonomy of Attention,
attention can be classified into:

➢ Sustained attention

➢ Alternating attention
➢ Divided attention
➢ Selective attention
➢ Focused attention

➢ Sustained attention: Sustained attention is the ability to maintain a

consistent behavioural response during continuous and/or repetitive activity
(i.e) focusing on one task only over a period of time. This has 3 stages:
attention getting, attention holding & attention release. It is the ability to
focus on one specific task for a continuous amount of time without being
distracted. You use sustained attention when you continuously maintain
focus on one task or concentrate on an activity for a prolonged period of
time without getting distracted. Eg: focusing while playing Solitaire, paying
attention to a short conversation or lecture, reading a book, playing a video,
or fixing a car. It can be challenging to maintain this type of attention for a
significant amount of time without becoming distracted. Therefore, your
level of sustained attention will often vary. However, a key aspect of
sustained attention is the ability to re-focus on the task after a distraction
arises.

➢ Alternating attention: The ability of mental flexibility that allows

individuals to shift their focus of attention and move between tasks having
different cognitive requirements. (i.e) alternating your focus back and forth
between 2 different tasks. Eg: alternating between cooking and helping your
child with their homework. You probably use alternating attention almost all
the time. You constantly need to make sudden changes on your activities or
actions which require your attention to shift. You may use alternating
attention when reading a recipe and then performing the tasks of recipe. It
also could be alternating between unrelated tasks such as cooking while
helping your child with homework.
➢ Divided attention: In divided attention tasks, people must attend to several
simultaneously active messages, responding to each as needed (Hawkins &
Presson, 1986). In the laboratory, divided attention is typically studied by
instructing participants to perform 2 tasks simultaneously. Unless the tasks
have been well practiced, performance typically suffers. Divided attention is
the ability to process 2 or more responses or react to 2 or more different
demands simultaneously. It is often referred to as multi-tasking. Basically,
dividing your attention between 2 or more tasks. Examples of divided
attention include checking email while listening in a meeting, talking with
the friends while making dinner, or talking on the phone while getting
dressed. Unlike alternating attention, when you are using divided attention,
you do not change from one task to another completely different task.
Instead, you attempt to perform them at the same time. So you are really
splitting your attention, instead of alternating it. Therefore, you are only
really focusing part of attention on each task. You are able to use divided
attention successfully because of muscle memory and/or habit. This is the
highest level of attention.

➢ Selective attention: This involves the ability to focus on one particular

stimulus in the presence of a competing stimulus. Selective attention is
closely related to divided attention. In divided attention, people are
instructed to pay equal attention to several tasks. In selective attention,
people are confronted with 2 or more simultaneous tasks and are required to
focus their attention on one while disregarding the others (Hawkins &
Presson, 1986). Selective attention studies often show that the people notice
little about the irrelevant tasks. You have probably noticed that you can
usually follow closely only one conversation at a noisy party; the content of
the other conversations is generally not processed. Selective attention is the
ability to select from the various factors or stimuli that are present and to
focus on only the one that you want.

➢ Focused attention: The ability to respond discretely to specific stimuli, such

as visual, auditory or tactile by excluding the others. We use focused
attention to attend to both internal stimuli and external stimuli. It is an
 important skill that allows us to carefully and efficiently carry out tasks in
our daily lives. It is defined as a basic, low-level ability to orient and
respond to specific stimuli in any modality. Eg: orienting to one’s name.

Research using the modern techniques has identified a network of areas throughout
the brain that accomplish various attention tasks (Farah 2000). Several regions of
the brain are responsible for attention, including some structures that are below the
surface of the cerebral cortex (Just et al, 2001).
Most of the research suggests that the attention is managed by 2 regions of the
cortex; 1) the posterior attention network in the parietal lobe and 2) the anterior
attention network in the frontal lobe.

The posterior attention network:

Imagine that you are searching the area around a bathroom sink for a lost contact
lens. When you are attending to a location in space, the posterior attention network
is activated. The posterior attention network is responsible for the land-of-attention
required for visual search, in which you must shift your attention around to various
spatial locations (Chun and Wolfe, 2001). The posterior attention network is
located in the parietal lobe of the cortex.

The parietal cortex was identified as the region of the brain used in attention tasks
related to visual searches through research using positron emission tomography
(PET scan), in which the researcher measures blood flow in the brain by injecting
the participant with a radioactive chemical just before he/she performs a cognitive
tasks. This chemical travels through the blood to dye parts of the brain that are
active during cognitive task; a special camera makes an image of the accumulated
chemical. According to PET scan research, the parietal cortex shows increased
blood flow when the people perform visual searches and pay attention to spatial
locations.

Another important method used to determine the biological basis of attention

focuses on people with the brain lesions. People who have brain damage in the
parietal region of the right hemisphere of the brain have trouble noticing a visual
stimulus that appears on the left side of their visual field. Those with damage in the
left parietal region have trouble noticing a visual stimulus on the right side (Luke
& Vecera, 2002).

The lesions produce remarkable deficits. For instance, a woman with a lesion in the
left parietal region may have trouble noticing the food on the right side of her plate.
She may eat only the food on the left side of her plate, and she might even
complain that she didn’t receive enough food. However, she may not seem aware
of her deficit.

The anterior attention network:

Research shows an area in the frontal lobe of the cortex is responsible for attention
tasks that focus on word meaning. The anterior attention network is active when
people try the Stroop task, in which word meaning interferes with colour
identification (Fan et al, 2002). This part of the brain is responsible for inhibiting
your automatic responses to stimuli.
On the Stroop task, you need to inhibit your automatic response of reading a word,
in order to name the colour of the link. The anterior attention network is also active
for top-down control of attention. Finally, this network operates when people are
asked to listen to a list of nouns and to state the use of each word, such as listening
to the word ‘needle’ and responding to ‘sew’.

 JOINT ATTENTION:

Mundy (2009) defines joint attention as an information processing system that

develops by 4-6 months of age.

Joint attention is an important aspect and is related to the language (Charman

2003; Mundy 1998). To acquire language, the child should understand the link
between words and objects and to interpret the communicative gestures of others as
intentional acts. This is evident from the language deficits seen in children with
disorders like autism, who has poor joint attention skills.

Thus, the joint attention behaviours emerge pre-linguistically between 6 to 13

months of age (Charman 2003) and involve interaction with others. This
interaction mainly takes place between young infants and mothers. The first step in
development of this joint attention is “pointing out objects to others” and
“checking others’ gaze direction towards objects” (Carpenter, Nagell & Tomasello,
2005) called basic joint attention behaviours.

Various researches have showed that the joint attention behaviours are particularly
related to the development of both expressive and receptive language (Charman
2003). The ability to follow the head and eye direction of an individual is one of
the earliest elements of joint attention development. Other behaviours associated
with joint attention are ‘follow pointing or to look in the point direction of
speaker’, ‘showing an object’, ‘checking’, ‘gestures’, ‘taking’, ‘giving’ and
‘response to name’. These are referred to as associated joint attention behaviours.

 DEVELOPMENT OF ATTENTION:

Attention develops in various stages during infancy, childhood and adolescence.

These stages are described below, as summarized by Rosslyn G (1993):

STAGE 1:

➔ Seen at the age of around 0-1 year

➔ Extreme distractibility is observed during this stage. The child gets
distracted with different objects easily

STAGE 2:

➔ Seen till about 2 years

➔ These children have an attention span more than STAGE 1 but they can
concentrate only on things and activities of their choice
➔ They also get easily distracted by any extraneous stimuli, whether auditory
or visual

STAGE 3:

➔ Seen in 2 to 3 years old children

➔ In this stage, children cannot attend to more than one stimulus at a time. Eg:
a child cannot listen to an adult’s directions while playing; he can shift his
full attention to the adult and then back to the game with the help of the
adult.
STAGE 4:

➔ Seen in 3 to 4 years old children

➔ Here, the child can alternate between the auditory and visual stimuli (eg:
playing and listening to directions) without the help of an adult.

STAGE 5:

➔ Seen at around 4 to 5 years

➔ Here, the attention becomes 2 channeled (i.e) the child can attend to both the
auditory and visual stimuli simultaneously (more than 1 stimulus). Eg:
listening to rules of the game while playing the game.

STAGE 6:

➔ At around 5-6 years of age, the attention is well-established and sustained.

The auditory, visual and other manipulating channels are fully integrated.

STAGES LEVELS OF CHARACTERISTICS

DEVELOPMENT

Stage I Can pay fleeting attention, Attention is held by

0-12 months highly dominant stimulus in the
distractible environment.

Stage II Rigid attention to his/her Does not look up when

12-24 months own choice of activity name is called.
Concentrate only on
activities of their choice.

Stage III Single channel attention. Cannot attend to more

24-36 months Can attend to adult’s than one stimulus at a
choice of activity if under time.
adult control
Stage IV Single channeled Child needs to give full
36-48 months attention. Under adult’s attention; the child can
control alternate between the
auditory and visual
stimuli without the help of
 an adult.

Stage V Integrated attention for 2 channeled attentions

48-60 months short spells (i.e) the child can attend to
both the auditory and
visual stimuli
simultaneously.

Stage VI Integrated attention Attention is

60-72 months wellestablished and
sustained. Can maintain
attention for a longer
period of time.
Manipulating channels are
fully integrated.

Articles:

→ Bartgis, Thomas, Lefler & Hartung (2008) examined the development of

attention and response inhibition in children aged 5 to 7 years. They were
assessed over 4 counterbalanced phases of a continuous performance task.
Phase 1 was designed to measure attention without distraction, Phase 2 was
designed to measure attention with distraction, Phase 3 was designed to
measure attention and response inhibition without distraction and Phase 4
was designed to measure attention and response inhibition with distraction.
It was found that with regard to attention, 7-years old performed
significantly better than 5-years old. This age difference was more
pronounced when distraction was present. With regard to response

inhibition, there were no significant age differences. These results suggested

that the attention improves as the child matures.

→ Frank, Vul & Johnson (2007) investigated the focus of attention by

recording eye movements of 3-, 6-, 9- and 12-month-olds infants and adults
as they watched a 4-minute video consisting of alternating clips from A
Charlie Brown Christmas and moving random-dot kinematograms. They
 concluded that the diffuse attention slowly gives way to more focused
attention over the course of the first year and beyond.

 THEORIES AND MODELS OF ATTENTION:

There are 2 theories of attention. They are as follows:

 BOTTLE NECK THEORIES

 BROADBENT’S FILTER MODEL

 TREISMAN’S ATTENUATION MODEL
 THE DEUTSCH-NORMAN LATE SELECTION MODEL

 CAPACITY THEORIES

 KAHNEMAN’S CAPACITY MODEL

 NORMAN & BOBROW’S MODEL

 BOTTLE NECK THEORIES: Bottle neck theories purposes that there is a

narrow passage way similar to a bottle neck in human information processing.
This limits the quantity of information to which we can pay attention. It
regulates the flow of information and prevents the overload of the information.
These theories were proposed by Broadbent (1958).

According to bottle neck theories, the apparent bottleneck effect or the

narrowing down of the information that reaches conscious awareness. They
are called the theories of selective attention because they describe how some
information is selected for processing as the rest gets discarded. The bottle
neck theories are called the theories of selective attention.
The models that are based on the bottle neck theories are:

 BROADBENT’S FILTER MODEL

 TREISMAN’S ATTENUATION MODEL
 THE DEUTSCH-NORMAN LATE SELECTION MODEL

 BROADBENT’S FILTER MODEL: It was given by Donald

Broadbent (1958). It is the first detailed theory of attention. It is also
called as filter model of attention or ‘all-or-nothing’ filter model. The
 sensory register or the sensory information store is a memory of the
stimuli that have recently been presented. Stimuli are stored in
sensory memory in one of the several channels, each channel
corresponding loosely to a different sensory modality. Although the
duration of this memory is brief, its contents are thought to be exact
representations of the original stimuli. When they stored in sensory
register, the stimuli are subjected to a pre-attentive analysis, which
determines some of their physical characteristics such as pitch and
intensity.

This pre-attentive analysis determines which stimuli will undergo further

processing. The stimuli not selected are essentially tuned out; no further of them
takes place. Following the selection, the stimuli are shunted along a limited
capacity channel to the detection device. Thus, if asked to pay attention to several
demanding tasks simultaneously, the shunting channel lacks the capacity to carry
all the information simultaneously to the detection device. Instead the selective
filter switches as rapidly as possible among the channels in the sensory register, in
each case to shunting channel. Great information can be stored simultaneously in
the sensory channels, but evacuating these channels has to be done serially that is
one channel at a time. Information in the shunting channel is transferred to the
detection device, where the information meaning is analyzed. According to
Broadbent’s position, we know only about the stimuli that make it past the
selective filter. Information that was stopped at this stage is subjected to only
preattentive analysis, which is capable of determining the stimulus meaning.

The filter selects the certain positions of the information, that coming from the
shadowed channel and allows it to pass through. Information coming from the
unattended channel is blocked. The selection is based on the physical
characteristics of the stimulus. In the next step, whatever the information gets past
the filter then undergoes pattern recognition.

Information travels to a STM store, where it is held for a longer period of time and
made available for subsequent processing and response. Selection in this model is
performed entirely by the filter and not by any selection mechanism that comes
later. Broadbent’s model is referred to as an early selection model because the filter
screens out information before it can be recognized.
The model over simplified human attentions one attention is in cocktail party
effect. Some information gets through the unattended channel. The filter does not
block words of great personal relevance such as your name and words associated
with danger, for eg: ‘fire’. Broadbent’s model has the filter completely blocking all
information coming from the unattended channel.
  TREISMAN’S ATTENUATION MODEL:

It was given by Treisman (1964) which is similar to filter theory. Instead of

completely blocking out the unattended message, the filter attenuates or weakens
it. The addition is that the unattended message would be passing through all the
processing stages, but in a weakened form. It consists of 2 components, each
relying on the other to function properly one already established component of this
model is the selective filter and the newly proposed element is a ‘dictionary’. This
dictionary symbolizes information or words which require a very low threshold in
order to be recognized ‘dictionary’ –selection between messages is on the basis of
the content. Different words have different chances of making it through the
unattended channel, due to a threshold effect. A threshold is the minimum amount
of deviation required to produce conscious awareness of a stimuli.

The stimuli with associated low threshold easily make into awareness. But those
with associated big thresholds do not. A word meaning determines its threshold.
The threshold may also be conceptualized as volume required to hearing certain
words or information. The cocktail path effect is often used as an example.
Important words and those with the personal relevance, such as your name, have a
lower threshold for recognition and make it pass the filter. Less important words,
for eg: ‘chair’, have higher thresholds and are filtered out. The incoming stimuli
are briefly held in a sensory register and undergo pre-attentive analysis by an
attenuation filter on the basis of crude physical characteristics. They propose that
there is a decrease in the perceived loudness of an unattended message. This
message will usually not be loud enough to reach its threshold unless it has a very
low threshold to begin with (your name). Unattended stimuli re-attenuated (the
signal strength is lowered) before passing to the detection device (a pattern
recognizer, comprising a number of ‘dictionary units’) where they are semantically
processed if they meet criteria. This is, therefore an early selection theory, and an
attenuation model of attention.

 THE DEUTSCH-NORMAN LATE SELECTION MODEL:

The model was given by Deutsch & Deutsch (1963) and refined by Norman
(1968). It is based on semantic characteristics. The selection happens later in
processing. It is also called the late selection model. It proposes that everything is
meaningfully processed or semantically analyzed prior to pattern recognition. It
proposes that the selection is assumed to operate on response output. All input
activates a semantic representation; all information is recognized. The first stages
of the processing are same. Information from the sensory store is filtered on the
basis of the physical characteristics and then recognized. It selects the information
on the bases of semantic characteristics or message content.
Just prior to the listener responding aloud, the words are selected on the basis of
their importance.

Late selection model requires that all stimuli recover full analysis from pattern
recognition processes. Nothing is saved in terms of perceptual processing, unlike
the case with early selection or attenuation models. The only purpose for the filter
in the late selection model is to provide a focus of attention for further processing
beyond pattern recognition.
  CAPACITY THEORIES: Capacity theories are called the theories of
divided attention. They conceptualize attention as a limited source that must
be spread around different informational sources.

The models that come under the capacity theories are:

 KAHNEMAN’S CAPACITY MODEL

  NORMAN & BOBROW’S MODEL

 KAHNEMAN’S CAPACITY MODEL:

This was given by Daniel Kahneman (1973). The capacity models describe
attention as a resource. The resource refers to the amount of mental effort or
energy required to perform a task. If a task requires more attention, the more
mental effort the person exerts. The amount of available capacity achieves a peak
when an individual is moderately aroused in terms of activation of the sympathetic
nervous system. Arousal refers to the physiological activation and is reflected in
values such as cardiac and respiratory rates. Moderate levels of arousal are
assumed to produce the greatest amount of available capacity.
In sufficient arousal condition, capacity decreases, as when a student has an
impossible deadline to meet.

 NORMAN & BOBROW’S MODEL:

It was given by Norman & Bobrow (1975). They proposed that the limits of
attention are related to the limited amount of mental effort that we can spend on a
task.

They reject the proposal of a bottleneck that limits the flow of information. Instead,
they argue that the deterioration of performance occurs when we divide our
attention as a result of several processes competing for the same limited resources.

Task performance is restricted either by our limited memory ability or by the

quality of the stimulus.

Data limited tasks: A data limited task is limited by the quality of the data (or
information) rather than by the limits of attention.

Resource limited tasks: According to Norman & Bobrow, there is a fixed upper
limit on the amount of resources that are available for processing. There is no
interference among the activities as long as this limit is greater than the total
processing resources required by the tasks being performed.

 ATTENTION IN VARIOUS LANGUAGE DISORDERS:

  Damage to the frontal lobe  Attentional Dyslexia
 Alzheimer’s disease (AD)
 Attention deficit disorders (ADD)
 Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)
 Dementia
 Aphasia
 Neglect (or) Right & Left Hemisphere Damages (RHD & LHD)
 Autism
 ADHD
 Learning Disability (LD)
 Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

 Damage to the frontal lobe: The frontal lobes compose between a

quarter and a third of the human cerebral cortex and are the most
readily distinguishable difference between the primate brain and that
of other mammals. Damage to the frontal lobe results in a variety of
symptoms that have generally been classified as deficits in the
executive control functions or supervisory system. As mentioned
earlier, the anterior attentional system proposed by Posner & his
colleagues is believed to be sub served by the frontal portion of the
cingulated gyrus. As many frontal lesions result in aphasic symptoms,
researchers have looked at the relationship between executive and
language functions. In general, the finding has been that the executive
dysfunctions are separate from language dysfunctions.

Articles:

→ Glosser & Goodglass (1990) found that aphasics with or without lesions
extending to the dorso-lateral regions of the left frontal lobe do not differ in
language tasks, but the former are more impaired on tests of executive
control.
→ Awh, Smith & Jonides (1995) found deficits in verbal WM with left frontal
damage and in spatial WM with right frontal damage. Patients with right
 frontal damage are usually not aphasic, but can display aprosodia and
deficits in discourse and pragmatic aspects of language (Alexander, Benson
& Stuss 1989). Degeneration of either frontal lobe results in reduced verbal
output and finally in mutism (dynamic aphasia), without specific deficits in
the structural aspects of language (Neary 1995). Attention is an important
factor in executive or supervisory functions, and thus seems to affect
language behaviour indirectly, via these executive functions.

 Attentional Dyslexia: The 4 patients with attentional dyslexia who

have been described in the literature-F.M & P.T. (Shalice &
Warrington, 1977), B.A.L (Warrington, Cipolotti, 81:11 McNeil,
1993), and P.R (Price & Humphreys, 1993) all present acquired
dyslexia without dysgraphia. The defining symptom of attentional
dyslexia is the ability of the patients to read whole words better than
to name the letters in a word. Patients can name single letters, but not
a row of letters; they can read single words but not a row of words in
the 2 patients described by Shallice & Warrington (1977) and in P.R
described by Price & Humphreys (1993), this impairment was not
restricted to verbal stimuli. For eg: they were better at naming a single
shape or a picture than a row of shapes or 3 pictures presented
simultaneously. These deficits cannot be attributed to a primary
spatial deficit, as all of these patients could point to the letter they
were attempting to identify and had no deficits in scanning attention
in a cancellation task. Both Shalice (1988) and Price & Humphreys
(1993) suggest that the deficit in these cases reside in the setting of the
appropriate focus or size of the selective attentional window, which
allows output from perceptual analysis of stimuli other than the target
to activate higher stages of processing, which results in response
interference.

Articles:

→ Warrington et al (1993) report that B.A.L has trouble only with the verbal
stimuli and not with the pictures. They suggest that, in this patient, the locus
of the attentional deficit lies after a stage at which the letters or words have
been accessed as units, at the stage of transmission of information from a
 visual word-form system to a semantic or phonological stage of processing.
This interpretation converges with psycho-linguistic models of visual word
recognition in which attention modulates processing at all stages (eg:
Monsell, Patterson, Graham, Hughs & Milroy, 1992; Tabossi & Zardon,
1993).

→ Chiarello & her colleagues (eg: Chiarello, 1991) have shown that the
semantic priming occurs on a broader scale in the RH than the LH,
suggesting that the LH may have some sort of mechanism to halt spreading
activation. It may be the functioning of this mechanism on various levels
that is damaged in attentional dyslexics.

 Alzheimer’s disease (AD): One of the first non memory

neuropsychological consequences of Alzheimer’s disease is a decline
in attentional capacities. This decline has been documented in the
entire attentional functions defined earlier. Several studies have
suggested that certain language deficits seen in patients with dementia
of the Alzheimer’s type (DAT) are the results of the specific
attentional deficits, not of a deterioration of linguistic abilities. These
suggestions make sense within an interactive/connectionist model of
language processes, in which attention is a modulating factor have
suggested that mildly demented Alzheimer’s patients are deficient in
their ability to inhibit partially activated information, which causes the
mispronunciation of exception words during reading and large
priming and inhibitory effects in lexical decision tasks.

Articles:

→ Niels, Roeltgen & Greer (1995) have shown that deficits in measures of
selective attention and vigilance predict the degree of characteristic spelling
errors made by DAT patients to a greater degree than a measure of language
ability.

→ Waters, Caplan & Rochon (1995) have shown that lowered performance on
a sentence comprehension task in DAT patients is the result of inefficient
 executive control and allocation of attention to the propositional structure of
sentences, and not of a deficit in syntactic processing. It will be interesting to
follow the theoretical utility of connectionist models of language processing
that interact with an attentional faculty in the elucidation of language
breakdown in these patients.

 Attentional deficit disorders (ADD): A large area of research

focuses on attention deficit disorders (ADD), which are diagnosed in
(usually) school-aged children. Such children exhibit lowered or age
inappropriate, levels of attention, heightened impulsivity, and over
activity, together with poor modulation and self-regulatory behaviour.
Unfortunately, the majority of the research in this area is not typically
done within the supporting structures of an attentional theory or
model, and the final results of such projects often end up as orphaned
lists of empirical findings from which it is hard to generalize.

Recent research (eg: Elbert 1993, Goodyear & Hynd 1992) has focused on
differentiating clinically distinct subclasses among children with ADD, specifically
those who have a co-occurring motor hyperactivity (ADD+H) and those who do
not (ADDH). Many authors have noted that there is a high co-morbidity of ADD
with LDs, specifically with reading and writing abilities (eg: Ackerman, Dykman,
Oglesby & Newton 1994; Elbert 1993; Whyte 1994). However, the relationship
and directionality between these disorders are not clear. Studies looking at the
reading and writing ability of children with ADD reveal that these skills are below
normal (Elbert 1993), while studies looking at children with dyslexia reveal that
many of them have attentional disorders (Ackerman et al, 1994; Whyte, 1994). On
the other hand, many studies using the directed attention manipulations in the
dichotic listening paradigm find that reading-disabled children are able to raise the
performance of the left ear when attending to it even more than normally reading
controls.

Articles:

→ Morton (1994) has shown that the ability to direct attention in the dichotic
listening task can interact with a subtype of dyslexia and specific
characteristics of the stimuli. In these studies, the authors either specifically
chose non-ADD, subjects, or didn’t categorize their subjects by behavioural
 attentional criteria. Thus, further research in areas, developmental dyslexia
and ADD, is needed to clarify the relationship between them.

Measurement and interpretation of ERPs have provided of a useful tool to measure

neural activity associated with both sensory and cognitive processes in these
subject populations. The component known as P300 has been interpreted as an
index of amount and allocation of attentional resources.

→ Duncan et al (1994) measured both auditory and visual ERPs from a group
of adult developmental dyslexics and normally reading controls. They report
that abnormally small P300 components appeared only in a visual task, and
only in the subgroup of dyslexics that had also suffered from ADD+H in
childhood. The dyslexics who had not, revealed brain potentials that were
indistinguishable from those of the control subjects. The 2 subgroups of
dyslexics were not distinguishable on the behavioural measures. These
authors also found a hemispheric asymmetry in the P300 components where
both normal subjects and non-ADD dyslexics revealed higher amplitudes
above the RH, whereas the ADD+H dyslexics revealed an opposite pattern.
The ERP data, together with the hypothesis that RH parietal areas are
involved in reading, implicate the RH in disorders of reading and attention.
A large amount of evidence points to the centrality of the RH in the control
of visual attention (eg: Hellige 1993a). RH damaged patients also have
difficulties with the pragmatic aspects of language: understanding metaphors
and humour, and’ 1n the use of contextual cues to interpret conversations
(Brownell, Carroll, Rehak & Wingfield 1992). Several groups of researchers
have investigated cognitive and social behaviour of children with
Developmental RH Syndrome (Gross-Tsur, Shalev, Manor & Amir 1995;

Voeller & Heilman 1988). These are the children who present with
neurological signs that suggest a deficit in the functioning of the RH. In
these studies together with paralinguistic deficits, almost all of the children
were diagnosed with ADD.

→ Branch, Cohlen & Hynd (1995) report that behavior rating scale scores and
the frequency of diagnosis of ADD+H are not different among the children
believed to have LHD or RHD. As with the epidemiological data already
described these findings are suggestive of possible relationships between
 reading as a visual attentional task and the specialization of the RH for
spatial attention. However, there is a need for a stronger empirical and
theoretical basis for such hypotheses.

 Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI): Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) has been
associated with the impairment of multiple subcomponents of attention,
including vigilance and sustained attention, selective attention, divided
attention and strategic or executive control of attention. It also has been
demonstrated that TBI associated with slowed cognitive processing (Posner
& Kinsella 1992), and there is an ongoing debate about the extent to which
slowed processing is the primary deficit in TBI and/or whether slowed
processing can account for the attentional impairments that have been
demonstrated in TBI patients. There is reasonably convincing evidence that
TBI can be associated with the impairments of sustained, selective, divided
and executive attention that are not reducible to a slowing of processing
speed (Mathias & Wheaton 2007).

Articles:

→ Whyte, Polansky, Fleming, Coslett & Cavallucci (1995) demonstrated

differences between healthy controls and TBI patients on a go/no-go
vigilance task, requiring them to respond to pairs of equal-length lines and
inhibit responding when lines were of different lengths. In addition to
showering slower performance overall and a steeper decrement in speed and
accuracy over time, subjects with TBI also showed lower initial accuracy in
detecting targets, despite an attempt to equate the 2 groups on this measure
by adjusting the stimulus duration individually for each participants.

→ Robertson & colleagues (1997) also demonstrated the differences between

TBI patients and normal controls on the Sustained Attention to Response
Task (SART). This task requires the participants to make a key press
response to each digit in a randomly presented string, but to withhold a
response whenever the digit 3 is presented, on 11% of trials. In contrast to
the SART, results in RH patients discussed above, Robertson & colleagues
found that the TBI patients were less accurate than controls, but not slower.
 They also found that the number of errors made on the SART correlated
with the reported lapses of attention in everyday life. The subsequent studies
of SART performance in TBI have been inconsistent, and a recent study
failed to replicate Robertson & colleagues’ key findings of decreased
accuracy, normal response speed and correlations with everyday cognitive
lapses (Whyte, Grieb-Neff, Gantz & Polansky, 2006).

→ Paul, Mark, Pauline & Lina (2006) reported that the poor sustained
attention or alertness is a common consequence of TBI and has a
considerable impact on the recovery and the adjustments of TBI patients.

→ Pare & Keine (2003) reported that the deficits in divided attention occur
after a mild TBI. They evaluated divided attention using a dual task
paradigm and found that the MTBI group had deficits in divided attention
even 3 months post injury.

 Dementia: Disturbance of attention is not common among the diagnostic

criteria for most types of dementia, but there is recognition that attention can
be impaired by AD and other causes of dementia, and furthermore, that the
deficits in particular domains of attention can be helpful in differentiating
certain types of dementia. Impaired and/or fluctuating performance on tests
of alertness, vigilance and sustained attention are among the diagnostic
criteria for dementia with Lewy Bodies (DLB). In contrast, alertness and
sustained attention remain relatively unimpaired in patients with AD, at least
until later stages of the disease. Impairments of the selective attention, the
ability to resist distraction, have been observed in AD, DLB and
frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Executive control and divided attention
have been shown to be impaired even in the early AD. At the same time,
neuropsychological tests of executive functioning have shown greater
impairments in the frontal variant of FTD than in AD. Typically, attention is
not the focus of assessment or management of dementia, but the
consideration of attention functioning may provide helpful diagnostic
information, and also may be value in designing plans of treatment or care
for persons with dementia.
  Aphasia: Impairment of language following LHD is the major defining
feature of aphasia, and to the extent that they have been recognized or
discussed at all, deficits in other cognitive domains, such as attention,
traditionally has been considered to be of secondary importance. There is a
growing recognition that attention and related constructs may be of both
theoretical and direct clinical importance in understanding, diagnosing, and
treating aphasia.

Articles:

→ Kriendler & Fradis (1968) were among the first to study attention in aphasia
in detail, demonstrating deficits in arousal, vigilance, and sustained attention
in the performance of both linguistic and non-linguistic tasks. They also
noted that the moment-to-moment; within-person variability is a prominent
feature of aphasic language performance. A person with aphasia may
correctly name an object on one occasion, but fail the very same task even a
few moments later. According to McNeil and colleagues, this sort of
variability, along with several other features of aphasia, demonstrates that
language representations are not lost, but rather that access to them is
impaired. Put differently, aphasia impairs a person’s language performance,
not their underlying linguistic competence.

 Neglect (or) Right & Left Hemisphere Damages (RHD & LHD): Patients
with neglect fail to respond to information presented on the side opposite to
their brain lesion. Neglect, or ‘left-sided neglect’, as it is sometimes called, is
often considered a hallmark of RHD. Although, it can occur in LHD
patients, it is more frequent, more severe, and longer lasting with RH
lesions. Very often, patients with neglect appear less responsive and less
aroused than do RHD patients without neglect. Clinical experience suggests
that the presence of neglect may be a good indicator of impaired cognitive
and communicative processing.

Attentional deficits specifically associated with RHD:

Attentional deficits Evidence
Arousal and orienting Neuro-chemical: non-adrenergic
pathways are important to arousal and
 somewhat lateralized to the RH.

Autonomic: reduced GSR’s

novel/emotional input rapid habituation.

Behavioural: slower reaction times than

LHD patients in some studies.

Narrowed focus Faster than normal reaction times to

stimuli in a relative rightward position.

Sustained attention Deteriorating performance of RHD

subjects during reaction time tasks.
Reduced performance in reaction time
tasks in Inter-stimulus Intervals
increase.

Vigilance Reduced autonomic signs of attentional

mobilization (eg: heart rate
deceleration). Increased blood flow and
metabolic activity in the RH of
NonBrain damaged subjects during the
vigilance tasks.

Selective attention Slower reaction times than LHD

subjects in target-foil cancellation
tasks. Increased severity of left neglect
in controlled, serial processing
cancellation tasks.

 Autism: Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder (PDD) which is

characterized by triad features of the social impairment, language and
communication impairment and stereotypical behaviour. It is a lifelong
developmental disability which typically appears at around 2-3 years.
Autism interferes with the following areas: Communication, social
participation, the repertoire of activities, interests & imaginative
 development, development rate & sequences, sensory processing and
cognition. Children with autism often present significant deficits in joint
attention (Charman 2004). Various recent researches suggest that a
disturbance in development of joint attention skills is a specific
characteristic of young autistic children.

Articles:

→ Mundy et al (2008) examined the effects of mental age and IQ on joint

attention skills of children with autism. He concluded that the differences in
IQ and mental age may be related to the differences in type of joint attention
skill deficits displayed by autistics. They also suggested that the joint
attention is mainly associated with various social cluster of symptoms
observed among autistics by their parents.

→ Clifford & Dissanayake (2008) investigated the early development of joint

attention, eye contact and affect during first 2 years of life in autistics. The
study reported anomalies in gaze and affect emerged in first 6 months
becoming more severe by 2 years in autistics. Also, joint attention
impairments were found throughout the second year of life.

→ Masconi, Mathew, Heather, Michele, Guido, Rachel & Joseph (2009)

conducted a longitudinal study of Amygdala volume and joint attention in 2-

4 years old autistic children. He reported that amygdale enlargement was

observed in autistic in 2-4 years of age. The enlargement is observed when
compared to controls but no increase in magnitude was seen in these 2-4
years. A significant association between volume of amygdala and joint
attention suggest that the alterations to this structure may be linked to core
deficit of autism.

→ Gernbacher, Stevenson, Khandakar & Goldsmith (2009) suggested that the

autistics’ atypical resistance to distraction atypical skill at parallel perception
and atypical execution of volitional actions underlie their atypical
manifestations of joint attention. He concluded that TD children, in addition
to responding to joint attention activities, also initiate the join attention
 skills. Such behaviours are named protodeclarative behaviours. Studies
have shown that 90% of the autistic are unable to point protodeclaratively
(Baron-Cohen, Cox, Baird, Swettenham, Nightingale et al 1996; Robbins &
Snow 2001). As cited in this study, autistics do initiate joint attention,
perhaps even as frequently as their non-autistic peers, but they do so in
atypical and unconventional ways.

→ Naber, Sopie, Swenkels, Buitelaar,Clauine, Emma & Marinus (2007)

studied joint attention in autistic children. It was found that the cognitive
delays and autistic symptoms were related to less joint attention. Already at
the age of 2 years, children with more autistic symptoms show less joint
attention even after controlling the development level.

 ADHD: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) which interferes

with a person’s ability to stay on a task and to exercise age-appropriate
inhibition. It is characterized by hyperactivity, inattention and impulsivity. In
order to understand the deficits and their causes in ADHD, various
neuropsychological models are proposed. These are described below:
 Executive attention model
 Attentional network model
 Energetic model

 Executive attention model: This states that the behavioural inhibition

is the primary deficit for ADHD which in turn gives rise to
impairment in non-verbal WM, verbal WM, self regulation of
affectmotivation-arousal and reconstitution. Thus, there is a primary
deficit in the executive functions of the neuro cognitive processes.

Articles:
→ Willcutta, Doylebb, Nigg & Penningtone (2005) conducted a
study to check the validity of executive function theory of
ADHD. He confirmed that there are significant weaknesses in
several executive function domains. This is one of the
important components of complex neuropsychology of ADHD.
 → Taplok, Jain & Tannock (2005) reported the ADHD scored less
in intellectual ability and WM when compared to normals.
Thus, confirming the executive dysfunctioning of ADHD.

 Attentional network model: This model relates the symptoms of ADHD

with cognitive processes and neural networks. They propose that
alerting (suppression of background noise by inhibiting ongoing or
irrelevant activities to establish sustained attention) is suppressed by
right dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex oriented by posterior parietal lobes.
Executive control supported by anterior cingulated network establishes
divided attention. This model states that an abnormality or
disconnection between these neural networks causes ADHD. Adults
with ADHD may have different neural organization primarily in the
frontal regions which results in the need for continually high levels of
cortical activation to maintain sustained attention.

Articles:
→ Frank, Vul & Johnson (2007) explored Attentional Network Test
(ANT) which assesses the functional integrity of attentional
network in ADHD children demonstrates that the children with
ADHD demonstrated deficits in alerting and conflict attention
networks but normal functioning of orienting network.

 Energetic model: It proposes that the overall efficiency of information is

determined by computational mechanisms of attention (response
output), state factors or energetic mechanisms (such as activation and
effort) and management or executive functions (EF). The
cognitiveenergetic model encompasses both top-down and bottom-up
processes and draws attention to the fact that ADHD causes deficits at
all the 3 levels.

 Learning Disability (LD): LD is defined as a disorder in one or more of the

basic psychological processes involved in understanding or usage of
 language, spoken or written, that may manifest itself in an imperfect ability
to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell or do maths (Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act, IDEA). Low academic achievement has been
shown in many studies to result from the impulsivity, hyperactivity,
attentional problems and cognitive deficits inherent in ADD (Pastor &
Reuben 2008).

Articles:
→ Zentall (2005) agrees that rather common disability factors for the
disorders, academic problems are secondary to and a result of
ADD. He contends, however that ADD characteristics that may
lead to learning difficulties is a need for higher stimulation. This
suggests that the academic achievement can be increased by
increasing attention.

 Specific Language Impairment (SLI): SLI is defined as the inability to

acquire normal expression and/or comprehension of language in the absence

of peripheral hearing impairment, neurological disorder and MR. The

presence of ADHD in some SLI children has been documented.

Articles:
→ Stevens, Sanders & Neville (2006) performed an ERP to compare
the earliest mechanisms of selective auditory attention in 12
children with SLI and 12 controls. ERPs were recorded to
linguistic and non-linguistic probe stimuli embedded in the
attended and unattended stimuli (story). By 100 msec, TD
children showed an amplification of the sensorineural response to
attended as compared to the unattended stimuli. In contrast,
children with SLI showed no evidence for sensorineural
modulation with attention, despite behavioural performance
indicating that they were performing the task as directed. These
data are the first to show that the SLI children have marked and
specific deficits in the neural mechanisms of attention and further,
 localize the timing of the attentional deficits to the earliest stages
of sensory processing. Deficits in the effects of selective attention
on early sensorineural processing may give rise to the diverse set
of sensory and linguistic impairments in SLI children.

 ROLES OF ATTENTION IN SPEECH & LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT:

Attention is an important cognitive skill. The most important aspect of attention in

speech and language is the joint attention. As discussed earlier, joint attention is
defined as the simultaneous engagement of 2 or more individuals in mental focus
on the same mental thing (Baldwin, 1995). According to Tomasello (1995), joint
attention is more complex, there is synchronization between both participants to
coordinate attention between the object and the other person. Attention plays an
important role in mediating the selection of competing candidates.

Articles:

→ Akhtar & Dunham (2009) assessed the relationship between

directive interactions and early vocabulary development. They
concluded that directing the joint attention of a 13-month old has
beneficial effects on vocabulary development.

→ Tomasello & Kruger (2009) focused on the acquisition of verbs in

ostensive and non-ostensive contexts on children in their second
year of life. They reported that the joint attention is one of the
basic requirements in learning and the use of language.

 CONCLUSIONS (MEMORY & ATTENTION):

In summary, there is considerable promise for the future in memory and its role in
communication disorders. Advances in understanding basic memory processes and
how they are affected in disorders, the application of the traditional approaches
within new frameworks, and the developments in computer technology offer hope
to improve the quality of life of individuals with memory impairments. Further
work is needed to study the specific memory processes which are affected across
the various clinical groups and the possible remedial measures. Evidence based
therapy techniques would go a long way in treating the individuals with memory
impairments. Memory loss through decay come from the non-use of memory and
memory loss through interference is due to the presence of other information in
memory, whereas, cue dependant forgetting is due to insufficient cues available to
retrieve information from memory. Memory is the sum total of what we remember
and gives us the capability to learn and adapt from the previous experiences as well
as to build relationships and the ability to remember past experiences and the
power or process of recalling to mind previously learned facts, experiences,
impressions, skills and habits.

Also, there is considerable promise for the future in attention and its role in
communication disorders. Attention is one of the most important higher order
mental functions. Alternation in attention span & its ability can lead to the
diagnosis of various psychopathologies. Alertness & arousal, orienting reflex and
the spotlight of attention correspond to input attention, a fast process involved in
encoding environmental stimuli into the mental system. Attention can be both
perceptual and memory oriented and the human attention accounts for the
acquisition of information & knowledge. Attention is performed both consciously
and unconsciously through the different human senses and the human attention
occurs in an integrated fashion of all the senses. Attention helps in better
organization of the perceptual field for maximum clarity & understanding of the
object or phenomenon. Paying attention is a major factor in focusing and
education. Pay attention in order to receive good notes. Self-control requires
attention and effort.

REFERENCES:

 Neuro biology of language

 Laura L. Murray, Memory: Descriptions, disorders, assessment,

management. Seminars in speech and language, volume 22, No.2, 2001.

 Alan Baddeley (1998). Human Memory- revised edition. U.S.A: Allyn &
Bacon.
 Carol Westby & Silvana Watson. Perspectives on ADHD: Executive
functions, WM and language disabilities. Seminars in speech and language,
Volume 25, No.3, 2004.

 John Bench (1993). Communication skills in hearing impaired children.

London: Whurr publishers.

 David A. Sousa (1995). HOW THE BRAIN LEARNS. U.S.A: The National
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 http://www.merriam-webster.com & Online references (Google, Pubmed)

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 Anderson, John .R (2004). Cognitive psychology and its implication 6th

edition, worth publication, page no: 519.

 Johnson J.S, Hollingworth A (2008). The role of attention is the

maintenance of feature bindings in visual, STM. Journal of experimental
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 Michael C. Frank, Edward Vul & Scott P. Johnson (2007). Development of

infants’ attention to faces during the first year. Cognition Journal Volume
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 Mundy P. Sigman M & Kasar C (2008). Joint attention, Developmental

level and symptom presentation in Autism. Journal of child language, 15 (2).

 Naber F.B, Sophie H.N, Swenkels, Buitelaar J.K, Clauine D. & Emma V.D
(2014). Joint attention and attachment in Toddlers with autism. Journal of
Abnormal child psychology 35, 899-911.
 Paul M, Mark A, Pauline & Lina L (2006). Sustained attention in TBI as
healthy controls. Enhanced sensitivity with dual task load archives of
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 Tomasello M. & Kruger C. (2009). Joint attention on action, acquiring

verbs in ostensive and non-ostensive contexts. Journal of child language 14,
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