This development is quite likely independent of language development. Kunde, Müsseler, and Heuer ( 2007), for example, showed that using a lever requires that the individual be able to manage the image of the hand moving in one direction and the other point of the lever moving in an opposite direction at the same time. Thus, we can only speculate about their role in the evolution of the modern mind.īoth visual and spatial working memory were probably important to the development of tool use. ( 1996) found strong group effects of two markers of the phonological loop, they found little evidence of reliability of measurement for the effects at the individual level. However, there has been either far too little work demonstrating the importance of the domain‐specific stores in a wide range of real‐world cognitive functions or far too little evidence of reliable individual differences in those functions. Cognitive psychologists suspect, for instance, that the phonological loop is important, possibly even necessary, the development of language and reading in the individual (Gathercole and Baddeley 1993). I am also confident that there are individual differences in the practice‐developed skill for the various coding formats, and it is also likely that there are differences in the biological mechanisms necessary to perform those functions, both of which would seem to be necessary for a role in evolution. The formats proposed in the Baddeley model have been studied extensively, and the phenomena that serve as their basis are large and reliable across experiments, even if they have not demonstrated reliability within the individual. I am confident that each of those domain‐specific stores is important in some way to modern cognition and has probably played an important role in the development of the modern mind. Rehearsal is one way in which that is accomplished. These links will decline in strength over time below a threshold of consciousness, but attention to a link will lead to reactivation that can maintain activation above that threshold. Like Cowan ( 1995), I conceive of the contents of these “stores” as temporarily activated representations in long‐term memory, as links or pointers, as it were, to existing representations in long‐term or secondary memory. However, I have argued that there are as many domain‐specific stores as there are different ways of thinking-probably on the order of a few dozen such formats (Engle and Kane 2004). More recent work has shown the need to fractionate these structures into more specialized structures such as one for visual information and another for spatial information (Logie 2003). More recently, Baddeley ( 2000) added a multidimensional store allowing binding of information across dimensions. The Baddeley and Hitch ( 1974) model proposed two formats for temporary storage: one based on speech or articulation and the other for representing and maintaining visual/spatial information. Working memory is a system of domain‐specific stores or formats for temporarily representing information along with a domain‐general supervisory or executive attention mechanism. What is working memory? What does it mean when we use the term “working‐memory capacity” (WMC)? How do we measure it? Do people differ in WMC in any meaningful way? Is that a trait or a state variable? Is it important in feral cognition? How might it have been important in the evolution of the human mind? What brain and genetic mechanisms might have led to that development? These are all questions I will try to deal with in the following pages with varying levels of confidence in the answers and, in some cases, mere speculation about the answers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |