The role of working memory as the pathway to long-term memory |b electrophysiological investigation of encoding and retrieval processes

Abstract

The present thesis contained three experiments to examine the role of working
memory as the pathway in the creation of long-term memory. In the first experiment, we compared encoding and retrieval effects in both working and long-term memory tasks for famous faces by using combined behavioral and event-related potentials (ERPs) methods. Performances between working and long-term memory were not associated. ERPs also showed evidence for dissociations during encoding, the attempt to retrieve from memories, and retrieval success between working and long-tern memory.
In the second experiment, we added a control condition to compare faces that
were studied in either a working memory test or a non-working memory task in an episodic memory test to investigate the role of working memory in the creation of long-term memory. ERPs again showed temporal and topographical dissociations between working memory and long-term memory during retrieval attempts and retrieval success. Faces that were studied in the working memory test were not better remembered than faces that were studied in the controls.
In the third experiment, we examined the role of working memory to data-driven
priming by changing the episodic memory test to a familiarity task. Priming was present for faces studied from both study conditions in comparison to new faces, but we found no differences in the amount of priming effects between faces studied in working memory test and non-working memory task.
In conclusion, our experiments showed evidence from both behavioral and
event-related potentials to support dissociations between working memory and
long-term memory. Additionally, the lack of performance advantages in both episodic memory test and priming tasks for faces studied in working over non-working memory tasks suggested working memory is not the pathway in the creation of long-term memory.

Date of Award	Sept 2010
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Bangor University
Sponsors	School of Psychology, Bangor University
Supervisor	Stephan Boehm (Supervisor) & David Linden (Supervisor)