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Working Memory, Attention And General Fluid Intelligence

Posted on:2008-04-08Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:J E WangFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155360215965692Subject:Development and educational psychology
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Working memory and attention are important components of cognitive basis, they are especially important for completing general fluid intelligence test tasks. They are crucial factors of mental activities such as problem solving and reasoning, which are closely associated with intelligence. Recently, the relatedness among working memory, attention and intelligence was testified by many researches, however, the results were not uniform.This research consists of three experiments. In Experiment 1, we explore whether the correlation of working memory, attention and intelligence depends on the test material and the attention task. The studies of Experiment 2 and 3 are based of Experiment 1. We further explore that in working memory, whether the time-course and the enabled brain areas of information rehearsal are the same between capital letters and Chinese words in Experiment 2; moreover, whether working memory (i.e. meaningful working memory and mechanical working memory) can be distinguished by event-related brain potentials. In Experiment 3, we illustrate that whether the time-course of information sustained of selective attention and sustained attention is the same, and what the difference is among the enabled brain areas of tasks response in Experiment 3. Based on Experiment 2 and 3, we study what the similarity and difference is in terms of the ERPs elicited by working memory and attention as well as enabled brain areas so as to explore whether the relatedness between them has neural basis. The results can be shown as follows:1. The results indicate that the correlation of working memory, attention and intelligence depends on the test material and the attention task. Intelligence is only associated with the working memory assessed by capital letters, but not Chinese words. Working memory is related with selective attention, whereas intelligence is related with sustained attention. 2. The ERPs of the two working memory tasks are very different. At about 500~600ms after presenting stimulus, positive component of the capital letters is generated in the posterior of the scalp, while negative component of the Chinese words appears at frontal lobe in the anterior of scalp. The posterior of the scalp may be the neural basis of the mechanical working memory, but the frontal lobe may be that of the meaningful working memory. Meanwhile, it is shown that working memory can be classified into meaningful working memory and mechanical working memory, which are proved to have neural basis.3. The ERPs elicited by the two attention tasks are different in the aspects of wave crest and amplitude. The ERPs elicited by sustained attention are bigger than those by selective attention in the early and late time. But in the metaphase, the latter are bigger than the former. The ERPs elicited by the two attention tasks reverse in the posterior of the scalp and the anterior of scalp.4. The two working memory tasks and the two attention tasks all cause N1 component, however, born of the wave crest and latent period time, the Nl component of the two working memory corresponds with that of the selective attention. From the enabled brain areas of the four tasks, the enabled brain areas of sustained attention tasks are similar with that of capital letter tasks, while the enabled brain areas of selective attention tasks are similar with that of Chinese words tasks. Therefore, we conclude that the measurements of the Chinese words working memory, selective attention and crystallized intelligence perhaps tend to be the storage ability, but the results of measuring working memory by testing the meaningless English capital letter, sustained attention and fluid intelligence may tend to the central executive.
Keywords/Search Tags:working memory, selective attention, sustained attention, general fluid intelligence
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