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Examination of the data suggested that all areas activated by the Read+Remember Trials were also activated by either or both of the component Read and Remember Trials (Table 1). The critical question was whether Read+Remember Trials would elicit activity in any regions that were not recruited by performance of either component task. R visual association areas (19)/cerebellum L visual association areas (19)/cerebellum L inferior frontal gyrus (44,45,47), precentral gyrus (6) On Control Trials, subjects viewed meaningless consonant strings and made left/right button presses. A set size of five sentences was chosen based on preliminary behavioral data suggesting that subjects would find this task challenging but would perform significantly above chance. The Sentence Processing phase of the Read+Remember Trials required concurrent processing of information (evaluating the content of each sentence) and maintenance of separate information (remembering the last word of each sentence). On Read+Remember Trials, subjects evaluated five sentences and remembered the final word of each sentence. The purpose of the recall cue was to ensure that subjects actively maintained the final words in memory throughout the trial. Subjects pressed one of two buttons to indicate whether these letters correctly represented the order in which the five final words had appeared. At the end of the trial, an array containing the first or last letter of the final word of each sentence appeared on the screen. On Remember Trials, subjects viewed five consecutive narrative sentences and were instructed to simply remember the final word of each sentence.
#Psyscope digit span trial#
This left/right button press served to equate visual and motor processing demands across trial types. Subjects pressed the left button if the arrows pointed to the left and the right button if they pointed to the right. On Read Trials, subjects evaluated five consecutive statements as true or false by pressing one of two buttons and then viewed an array of arrows. Words in the Sentence Processing phase appeared one at a time at the center of the screen. Each trial was 41.3 sec in length and had the same basic structure, with Instruction, Sentence Processing, and Recall phases. Subjects performed four different types of trials in the scanner: the WM span test, its two component tasks, and a baseline condition (Fig. WM span tests yield a psychometrically robust measure of executive WM capacity, but the neural substrates of performance of such a task have not been yet been thoroughly explored ( 32). WM span tests are also sensitive to changes in cognitive ability throughout development ( 23, 29) and in old age ( 26), as well as in neurological diseases that compromise frontal-lobe functioning ( 30, 31). Unlike single-task short-term memory measures such as digit span or word span, WM span tests are powerful predictors of performance on a wide variety of verbal (e.g., verbal Scholastic Aptitude Test, text comprehension) and nonverbal measures (e.g., mathematical and reasoning problems) ( 19– 20, 24– 28). These WM span tests, which include reading span ( 19– 20), listening span ( 21), operation span ( 22), and counting span ( 23), share the common property that they require concurrent processing (such as reading sentences for comprehension) and short-term maintenance (such as remembering the last word in each sentence). Psychologists have developed test paradigms with the goal of measuring executive WM capacity.