The Role Of Working Memory For Mental Operations On Long-Term Memory

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b3200019

The role of working memory (WM) for information in long-term memory (LTM) has been debated over the years. While some studies suggest that WM is a buffer for LTM information, some indicate that LTM can bypass WM. By combining two different studies divided in two sections, this work aimed to reveal the role of working memory for mental operations on long-term memory. In the first section of this thesis, we examined the role of WM for information in LTM for mental integration and recognition. WM was found to be the standard buffer for LTM retrieval for mental integration but not for recognition. Thus, this study informed the interplay between WM and LTM for storing and processing information that humans require for most daily tasks. In the second section, we examined the effect of external attentional guidance on the interactions between WM and LTM with search and recognition tasks in a neuroimaging study. Although WM reactivation was present in all tasks, it was higher for recognition blocks. This finding suggests that participants continued to rely on WM to represent studied information if the information was stored for either a search or a recognition task, and attentional guidance demand has no effect on the interactions between WM and LTM. Overall, this thesis indicates that (1) the reactivation of spatial information in LTM is preserved mainly for mental integration task but not for recognition task, (2) the reactivation of object representations in LTM is not affected by attentional guidance demands. Further, our results support the idea that WM and LTM interactions are flexible and anticipatory.