Impairments in Deductive Reasoning and Working Memory in Parkinson’s Disease

The prospects of working memory training for improving deductive reasoning

Cognitive (brain) training has been a major focus of study in recent years. In applied settings, the excitement regarding this research programme emanates from its prospects for far transfer—defined as observing performance benefits in outcome measures that are contextually, structurally or superficially dissimilar to the trained task (Perkins and Salomon, 1994). By and large, researchers have ...

Working memory capacity and the construction of spatial mental models in comprehension and deductive reasoning.

We asked 149 high-school students who were pretested for their working memory capacity (WMC) to read spatial descriptions relating to five objects and to evaluate conclusions asserting an unmentioned relationship between two of the objects. Unambiguous descriptions were compatible with a single spatial arrangement, whereas ambiguous descriptions permitted two arrangements; a subset of the ambig...

THE ROLE OF WORKING MEMORY IN DEDUCTIVE REASONING: A DUAL TASK AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES APPROACH by

Working memory and syllogistic reasoning.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relation between working memory span and syllogistic reasoning performance. In addition, performance for the reasoning task was compared to predictions made by mental model theory and the probability heuristics model. According to mental model theory, syllogisms that require the use of more mental models are more difficult. According to the probabili...

Working memory and reward association learning impairments in obesity.

Obesity has been associated with impaired executive functions including working memory. Less explored is the influence of obesity on learning and memory. In the current study we assessed stimulus reward association learning, explicit learning and memory and working memory in healthy weight, overweight and obese individuals. Explicit learning and memory did not differ as a function of group. In ...