OnTuesday, February 26, 2019, Gabriel JARJAT, PhD student in Cognitive Science, Psychology, and Neurocognition at the Laboratory of Psychology and Neurocognition (LPNC), will defend his thesis entitled "Aging of Working Memory: The Role of Attentional Refreshment."
The defense will take place at 2 p.m. in Room S at the Faculty of Arts, Languages, and Humanities on the Jacob-Bellecombette campus.
Thesis summary
Working memory, a system that keeps information highly accessible in order to perform a given cognitive task, is one of the cognitive functions whose performance declines with age. Two distinct mechanisms for maintaining verbal information in working memory have been identified: subvocal repetition and attentional refreshing. The latter mechanism relies on attentional processes, which are particularly sensitive to the effects of aging. However, research on the effects of aging on attentional refreshing remains fragmented and its results contradictory. The aim of this thesis is to evaluate the hypothesis that the functioning of attentional reactivation for the maintenance of verbal information is impaired with age. To do this, we evaluated the effects of using this mechanism on the performance of short- and long-term verbal information memorization in young and older participants. Overall, the results of the seven studies conducted seem to suggest that attentional refreshing is impaired in aging. However, factors such as information consolidation, which modulate the benefit of this mechanism on information retention, seem to mask the observation of the effect of age. Future research on the functioning of attentional refreshing in aging should further investigate (1) the involvement of factors modulating the effect of refreshing on the observation of the effects of age on this mechanism and (2) the precise origin of age-related attentional refreshing deficits.