On Tuesday, February 26, 2019, Gabriel JARJAT, PhD student in Cognitive Sciences, Psychology and Neurocognition at the Laboratoire de Psychologie et Neurocognition (LPNC), will present his thesis "Aging working memory: the role of attentional refreshment".
The defense will take place at 2pm, in room S of the Lettres, langues et sciences humaines UFR, on the Jacob-Bellecombette campus.
Summary of the thesis
Working memory, a system for maintaining information in a highly accessible state in order to perform a given cognitive task, is one of the cognitive functions whose performance declines with advancing age. Two distinct mechanisms for maintaining verbal information in working memory have been identified: subvocal rehearsal and attentional refreshment. The latter relies on attentional processes, which are particularly sensitive to the effects of aging. However, the study of the effects of aging on attentional refreshment remains patchy and the results contradictory. The aim of this thesis work is to evaluate the hypothesis that the functioning of attentional refreshment for the maintenance of verbal information is altered with age. To this end, we evaluated the effects of using this mechanism on short- and long-term verbal information recall performance in young and elderly participants. Overall, the results of the seven studies conducted seem to suggest that attentional refreshment is impaired in aging. However, factors such as information consolidation, which modulate the benefit of this mechanism on information retention, appear to be able to mask the observation of the age effect. Future research into the functioning of attentional refreshment in aging will need to investigate further the questions of (1) the involvement of factors modulating the effect of refreshment on the observation of the effects of age on this mechanism, and (2) the precise origin of the age-related deficit in attentional refreshment.