Working memory (WM) enables the storage and manipulation of limited amounts of information over short periods. Prominent models posit that increasing the number of remembered items decreases the spiking activity dedicated to each item via mutual inhibition, which irreparably degrades the fidelity of each item's representation. We tested these models by determining if degraded memory representat...

The standard LSTM, although it succeeds in the modeling long-range dependences, suffers from a highly complex structure that can be simplified through modifications to its gate units. This paper was to perform an empirical comparison between the standard LSTM and three new simplified variants that were obtained by eliminating input signal, bias and hidden unit signal from individual gates, on t...

INTRODUCTION A growing body of research suggests that intraindividual variability (IIV) may bring specific information on cognitive functioning, additional to that provided by the mean. The present paper focuses on dispersion, that is IIV across tasks, and its developmental trend across the lifespan. METHOD A total of 557 participants (9-89 years) were administered a battery of response time ...

Dynamic adjustments in cognitive control are well documented in conflict tasks, wherein competition from irrelevant stimulus attributes intensifies selection demands and leads to subsequent performance benefits. The current study investigated whether mnemonic demands, in a working memory (WM) task, can drive similar online control modifications. Demand levels (high vs. low) of WM maintenance (m...

Similarity among representations held simultaneously in working memory (WM) is a factor which increases interference and hinders performance. The aim of the current study was to investigate age-related differences between younger and older adults in a working memory numerical updating task, in which the similarity between information held in WM was manipulated. Results showed a higher susceptib...

The present research examined the role of working memory in the pursuit of qualitatively different achievement goals. Pursuit of a mastery-approach goal entails a focus on developing self-referential competence while a performance-approach goal entails a focus on demonstrating normative competence. Across two experiments it was found that, when working memory is loaded, individuals pursuing a m...

People have difficulty performing two tasks at once. For example, maintaining items in working memory (WM) makes people more distractible. However, different types of WM load may have different effects on attentional selection depending on whether WM load overlaps with mechanisms involved in target or distractor processing. Three experiments examined the effect of concurrent WM load on Stroop t...

Spoken words exhibit considerable variation from their hypothesized canonical forms. Much of the variation is regular, occurring often in language. The present work examines the immediate and long-term processing consequences for rule-governed final-/t/ variation in English. Two semantic priming experiments demonstrate that variation does not hinder short-term semantic processing, as long as va...

The evasion of CO2 from inland waters, a major carbon source to the atmosphere, depends on dissolved inorganic (DIC) concentrations. Our understanding DIC dynamics across gradients climate, geology, and vegetation conditions however have remained elusive. To understand its large-scale patterns drivers, we collated instantaneous mean (multiyear average) concentrations about 100 rivers draining m...

Substantial evidence suggests that individual differences in estimates of working memory capacity reflect differences in how effectively people use their intrinsic storage capacity. This suggests that estimated capacity could be increased by instructions that encourage more effective encoding strategies. The present study tested this by giving different participants explicit strategy instructio...