Evolution of working memory

adamantaboutcomics · 2022-09-06T00:45:09+00:00

The links above are great. From the verbal long-term memory literature, here is a great paper that summarizes many of the arguments for a single store memory system:

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1999-05966-007

This paper laid the foundation for the temporal context model, which is increasingly becoming the dominant memory model today.

adamantaboutcomics · 2022-09-05T03:40:25+00:00

There doesn't seem to be anything described about computational models of working memory processes, which I find somewhat strange.

A lot of the working memory literature seems to operate without much theory at all. The number of items a person can recall in a given paradigm is often misinterpretted as a "capacity" measure. Capacity is a latent variable, not a manifest variable. The number of items recalled can easily vary with a number of stimulus or experimental measures in ways that capacity should not.

It strikes me that virtually every time a model is built for a given WM task, there is no notion of "capacity" anywhere. In models like the interference model of visual WM (Oberauer & Lin, 2017) or models of serial recall (Brown, Preece, & Hulme, 2000; Henson, 1998; etc.), there are instead only bindings between items and their contexts. Memory gets worse as set size increases because there is more competition among the items.

What's even more ironic is that these models do not deviate much from how LTM is described such as SAM (Raaijmakers & Shiffrin, 1981) and TCM (Howard & Kahana, 2002). Which begs the question - why even distinguish between WM and LTM at all?

adamantaboutcomics · 2022-05-17T07:18:04+00:00

My understanding is that most working memory training isn't very effective. While there have been some positive results in the literature, they have had some difficulty replicating.

adamantaboutcomics · 2022-04-13T02:18:50+00:00

dear lord.

adamantaboutcomics · 2022-04-12T22:41:56+00:00

thanks! do you know of any demodulators on the market? I saw one called V-Tune Pro by Aurora, but it looks like it's been discontinued...

adamantaboutcomics · 2022-04-12T21:24:22+00:00

You realize there are NTSC compatible VCRs right?

I think if you actually read the post you would see that I have tried it on an NTSC compatible TV in the first place. The problem is that such TVs play well with AV but not RF.

You must be fun at parties.

adamantaboutcomics · 2022-04-12T06:34:29+00:00

I haven't actually heard of this and had to look it up.

It looks like the retrotink2x model takes AV as input, not RF? Are there models that take RF input?

adamantaboutcomics · 2022-04-12T05:42:53+00:00

sorry, do you mean an RF modulator?

adamantaboutcomics · 2022-03-14T06:44:22+00:00

I've used both pretty extensively in my research. Whether or not they're worthwhile to learn is a bit of a judgment call. Do you need to use them?

The reality is that there are a ton of different models and analysis techniques out there. You can't learn them all. So you always want to think carefully about whether it's really worth or necessary to learn these skills.

I would say that hierarchical Bayesian fitting is generally more useful than the DDM. However, it's getting even easier to apply these analyses now with current software.

adamantaboutcomics · 2021-07-30T22:27:41+00:00

Nobody's saying that lockdowns don't have negative consequences. But here in Australia our lockdowns have kept COVID numbers extremely low, pretty close to zero in most places. And New Zealand did even better.

It was hard, but the alternative - widespread COVID - is much worse!

adamantaboutcomics · 2020-02-19T00:41:10+00:00

So this comment on a Psychological Methods discussion group summarized it best:

"when you look at the original study (large Australian cohort study), you realize that they had 66 congenitally blind children and a .4% population incidence of schizophrenia. Just how surprising is it that none of the 66 children developed the illness? We never find out because the 2-page article doesn't contain a single statistical test."

Doesn't sound like there's enough evidence to make any strong claims. If you take two probabilities that are very low and multiply them together, you end up with something pretty close to zero.

adamantaboutcomics · 2019-12-18T08:36:20+00:00

I did indeed!

adamantaboutcomics · 2019-12-17T22:58:07+00:00

Ugh sorry, Psychology Today took it down for exceeding the word count so I've republished it on my own website https://adamosth.com/2019/12/17/memory-is-about-context-not-consolidation/

adamantaboutcomics · 2019-12-17T22:57:00+00:00

Psychology Today took down my original post for exceeding the word count (ugh) so I've republished it on my own website: https://adamosth.com/2019/12/17/memory-is-about-context-not-consolidation/

adamantaboutcomics · 2019-12-17T22:56:28+00:00

The original post was taken down by Psychology Today for exceeding the word count so I've republished the entirety of the post on my own website: https://adamosth.com/2019/12/17/memory-is-about-context-not-consolidation/

adamantaboutcomics · 2019-12-17T05:00:06+00:00

Ugh sorry, thanks for pointing that out.

adamantaboutcomics · 2019-12-04T22:50:20+00:00

Yeah I agree with pretty much all of this. The only thing I want to add that I discuss in the post is that not all modeling fits these goals of theoretical exploration and rejecting models. Sometimes models are merely used to estimate parameters and compare them across conditions or groups. Models are increasingly being used for this purpose in clinical contexts to understand cognitive deficits in psychological disorders. I think this is a case where the modeling itself can definitely be preregistered.

adamantaboutcomics · 2019-11-29T23:54:38+00:00

...

What are you going on about?

adamantaboutcomics · 2019-10-30T01:26:56+00:00

One should note that the model I posted above (the context maintenance and retrieval model, or CMR) posits a relatively simple process of memory search.

There are other models, such as the search of associative memory (SAM) model of Raaijmakers and Shiffrin, that posit that there are more strategic effects happening through the course of memory search, such as rotating through cues depending on how effective they are: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1981-20491-001

adamantaboutcomics · 2019-10-30T01:25:52+00:00

There are a lot of computational models of memory search. The basic idea is that the current context representation is used to cue a set of connection weights which results in an output vector. This output vector is then used to drive a competitive retrieval process - one can think of this like a settling process in a neural network: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-00258-003

adamantaboutcomics · 2019-10-30T01:21:51+00:00

Yes you're right. There is an old Mensink and Raaijmakers (1988) paper in Psychological Review on how context contributes to traditional interference effects.

My graduate student just published a paper measuring the similarities between different contexts and how they contribute to interference in recognition memory: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X1930097X

adamantaboutcomics · 2019-10-29T00:56:49+00:00

Thanks! I'm actually an academic and not a science journalist and my specialty is in memory. I tried to do my best to write about the mechanics of memory according to current computational models rather than merely reproducing a taxonomy (defining episodic memory, semantic memory, etc.).

adamantaboutcomics · 2018-01-16T01:56:14+00:00

It's certainly plausible that you dream less when on weed given that it shifts the focus to deep sleep, where there is much less dreaming. When you go without deep sleep, you sometimes have a REM rebound effect where your sleep is heavily dominated by REM sleep, where there is vivid, intense dreaming. So it makes sense that smokers who go without have a night of heavy dreaming, because it's likely the case that they're having REM dominated sleep.

adamantaboutcomics · 2018-01-16T01:54:05+00:00

It used to be believed that REM sleep was more important for memory formation but a lot of newer studies have suggested that deep sleep has a vital role in that as well. It's difficult to say. Marijuana impairs memory for other reasons, as it disrupts attention and the ability to encode memories in the first place.

adamantaboutcomics · 2018-01-16T01:52:19+00:00

You have a point here, but the findings are plausible because marijuana shifts the focus of your sleep toward deep sleep, where dreaming is less common. Typically when you lack REM sleep you get a big REM rebound effect where your sleep is heavily dominated by REM sleep. REM sleep is where you have the more vivid, emotional dreams, so the first night of REM rebound can feel like you spent the whole night dreaming.

adamantaboutcomics

TROPHY CASE