Project leader: Tianxiao Yang
Supervisors: Professor Susan Gathercole and Professor Alan Baddeley
Collaborator: Dr Richard Allen, University of Leeds
The ability to follow instructions is crucial for our effective functioning in everyday life, particularly during periods of study and learning. There is now considerable evidence that working memory plays an important role in supporting this ability. Children with poor working memory skills perform very poorly in following instructions of the form of “Touch the green pencil and put it in the blue folder” (Gathercole, Durling, Evans, Jeffcock, & Stone, 2008). The same difficulties are evident in classroom observations of children with working memory problems (Gathercole & Alloway, 2008).
The purpose of this project, led by PhD student Tianxiao Yang, is to provide a detailed experimental analysis of the contributions of subcomponents of working memory to the task of performing actions on instruction. Preliminary experiments required participants to either carry out sequences of actions by moving objects on a computer screen with the mouse, or to repeat the instructions. The spoken instructions were of the form “Click the flag; drag the star onto the triangle”.
A number of different concurrent tasks were compared in order to identify the contribution of distinct components of working memory to task performance. Backward counting, an activity known to disrupt the central executive, led to large deficits in both repeating and performing the action sequences. The contribution of phonological loop varied both with recall type and task environment.
A further experiment compared the performance of action sequences with repetition of the instructions in a paradigm involving the display and manipulation of real world objects rather than computerised displays. In this situation, there was a substantial advantage to action recall over verbal recall. Moreover, this action advantage was only acquired in a rich environment and disappeared in a computerized environment.
Further experiments are planned to explore the nature of the action recall advantage, with the purposes of advancing both our theoretical understanding of the cognitive process underpinning the ability to following instructions, and also more practically to help individuals who struggle to do this in practical learning situations in everyday life.
Gathercole, S. E. & Alloway, T. P. (2008). Working memory and learning: A practical guide for teachers. Sage Publishing.
Gathercole, S. E., Durling, M. Evans, S. Jeffcock, & S. Stone (2008). Working memory abilities and children’s performance in laboratory analogues of classroom activities. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 22, 1019-1037.
