Robert H. Logie – författare

The rapid growth in the numbers of older people worldwide has led to an equally rapid growth in research on the changes across age in cognitive function, including the processes of moment to moment cognition known as working memory. This book brings together international research leaders who address major questions about how age affects working memory:

Impairments of cognition, and particularly of working memory, can be major barriers to independent living. The chapters of this book dispel some popular myths about cognitive ageing, while presenting the state of the science on how and why working memory functions as it does throughout the adult lifespan.

Working Memory and Aging is the first volume to provide an overview of the burgeoning literature on changes in working memory function across healthy and pathological ageing, and it will be of great interest to advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in psychology and related subject areas concerned with the effects of human ageing, including several areas of medicine.

The rapid growth in the numbers of older people worldwide has led to an equally rapid growth in research on the changes across age in cognitive function, including the processes of moment to moment cognition known as working memory. This book brings together international research leaders who address major questions about how age affects working memory:

Impairments of cognition, and particularly of working memory, can be major barriers to independent living. The chapters of this book dispel some popular myths about cognitive ageing, while presenting the state of the science on how and why working memory functions as it does throughout the adult lifespan.

Working Memory and Aging is the first volume to provide an overview of the burgeoning literature on changes in working memory function across healthy and pathological ageing, and it will be of great interest to advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in psychology and related subject areas concerned with the effects of human ageing, including several areas of medicine.

Representation of the visual and spatial properties of our environment is a pivotal requirement of everyday cognition. We can mentally represent the visual form of objects. We can extract information from several of the senses as to the location of objects in relation to ourselves and to other objects nearby. For some of those objects we can reach out and manipulate them. We can also imagine ourselves manipulating objects in advance of doing so, or even when it would be impossible to do so physically. The problem posed to science is how these cognitive operations are accomplished, and proffered accounts lie in two essentially parallel research endeavours, working memory and imagery. Working memory is thought to pervade everyday cognition, to provide on-line processing and temporary storage, and to update, moment to moment, our representation of the current state of our environment and our interactions with that environment. There is now a strong case for the claims of working memory in the area of phonological and articulatory functions, all of which appear to contribute to everyday activities such as counting, arithmetic, vocabulary acquisition, and some aspects of reading and language comprehension. The claims for visual and spatial working memory functions are less convincing. Most notable has been the assumption that visual and spatial working memory are intimately involved in the generation, retention and manipulations of visual images. There has until recently been little hard evidence to justify that assumption, and the research on visual and spatial working memory has focused on a relatively restricted range of imagery tasks and phenomena. In a more or less independent development, the literature on visual imagery has now amassed a voluminous corpus of data and theory about a wide range of imagery phenomena. Despite this, few books on imagery refer to the concept of working memory in any detail, or specify the nature of the working memory system that might be involved in mental imagery. This essay follows a line of reconciliation and positive critiquing in exploring the possible overlap between mental imagery and working memory. Theoretical development in the book draws on data from both cognitive psychology and cognitive neuropsychology. The aim is to stimulate debate, to address directly a number of assumptions that hitherto have been implicit, and to assess the contribution of the concept of working memory to our understanding of these intriguing core aspects of human cognition.

Representation of the visual and spatial properties of our environment is a pivotal requirement of everyday cognition. We can mentally represent the visual form of objects. We can extract information from several of the senses as to the location of objects in relation to ourselves and to other objects nearby. For some of those objects we can reach out and manipulate them. We can also imagine ourselves manipulating objects in advance of doing so, or even when it would be impossible to do so physically. The problem posed to science is how these cognitive operations are accomplished, and proffered accounts lie in two essentially parallel research endeavours, working memory and imagery. Working memory is thought to pervade everyday cognition, to provide on-line processing and temporary storage, and to update, moment to moment, our representation of the current state of our environment and our interactions with that environment. There is now a strong case for the claims of working memory in the area of phonological and articulatory functions, all of which appear to contribute to everyday activities such as counting, arithmetic, vocabulary acquisition, and some aspects of reading and language comprehension. The claims for visual and spatial working memory functions are less convincing. Most notable has been the assumption that visual and spatial working memory are intimately involved in the generation, retention and manipulations of visual images. There has until recently been little hard evidence to justify that assumption, and the research on visual and spatial working memory has focused on a relatively restricted range of imagery tasks and phenomena. In a more or less independent development, the literature on visual imagery has now amassed a voluminous corpus of data and theory about a wide range of imagery phenomena. Despite this, few books on imagery refer to the concept of working memory in any detail, or specify the nature of the working memory system that might be involved in mental imagery. This essay follows a line of reconciliation and positive critiquing in exploring the possible overlap between mental imagery and working memory. Theoretical development in the book draws on data from both cognitive psychology and cognitive neuropsychology. The aim is to stimulate debate, to address directly a number of assumptions that hitherto have been implicit, and to assess the contribution of the concept of working memory to our understanding of these intriguing core aspects of human cognition.

This unique text/reference advocates a novel forgetful approach to dealing with personal multimedia content in the long run, which is inspired by the effectiveness of human forgetting as a mechanism for helping us to stay focused on important things. The text presents theoretical foundations, technologies, applications, and case study results that help the reader to understand the problems and challenges associated with personal digital preservation, and the solutions that can be developed in response to these challenges.