Working Memory and Its Benefits Essay - 2434 Words

What makes our everyday life very simple? What helps us to know what is happening now, what we are thinking now and what we are doing now? We are aware of the present moment or any changes in this moment, and this ability helps us in functioning effectively to face immediate environmental changes in our everyday life. This ability is called the Working Memory. The term working memory was coined by Miller, Galanter, and Pribram in 1960 (Baddeley, 2003). It refers to the temporary storage in the brain for manipulation of necessary information to execute cognitive tasks. According to Baddeley and Hitch’s study (1974), working memory comprises three main components, a control system, the central executive and two storage systems, the†¦show more content†¦During their study, these researchers found that blind participants performed higher than the sighted control group in a number of auditory, tactile and olfactory tasks ranging from basic sensory up to higher levels of co gnitive tasks. According to a study by Muchnik, Efrati, Nemeth, Malin and Hildesheimer (1991) found that blind participants outperformed sighted participants in auditory tasks. Similar results were noted by Alary, Duquette, Goldstein, Elaine, Voss, Buissonniere-Ariza and Lepore (2009) for tactile tasks. Other researchers also found similar results for olfactory perceptual discrimination (Cuevas, Plaza, Rombaux, Volder Renier, 2009), auditory localization (Lessard, Pare, Lepore and Lassonde, 1998), speech perception (Muchnik et. al, 1991), temporal perception (Muchnik et. al, 1991), voice processing (Klinge, RÃ" §der Bà ¼chel, 2010b) and short term (Bliss, Kujala Hamalinen, 2004) -long term memory tasks(Amedi, Raz, Pianka, Malach Zohary, 2003). These researches were done to understand intramodal plasticity and intermodal plasticity. The understanding of these modal will help in explaining how different neural mechanisms contribute to behavioral compensation including changes within the intact modality systems and changes that cross modality boundaries. For example, a study by Matteau, Kupers, Ricciardi, Pietrini and Ptito (2010) observed that visual deprivation can lead to higherShow MoreRelatedThe Effect Of Video Training On Brain Training Essay1521 Words   |  7 Pagesbrain training while normal people are looking towards brain training as a way to improve their performance and get a leg up on the competition in school, work, and life. Up until recently, it was believed that the brain was unchangeable in terms of memory capacity. Researchers were well aware of the fact that the brain is capable of changing and forming new connections when brain damage occurs. 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