| Budget Amount *help |
¥3,500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,500,000)
Fiscal Year 2000: ¥700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥700,000)
Fiscal Year 1999: ¥2,800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,800,000)
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| Research Abstract |
Working memory refers to the immediate brain processes involved in the simultaneous storage and processing of information.
In the present research, the parallel control system of both processing and storing was investigated using Japanese text reading. Because language comprehension is an excellent example of a task that demands extensive storage of partial and final products in the service of complex information processing, language comprehension would be an optimal method for measuring parallel control system of working memory. Moreover, Japanese text has unique property of syntactic structure and it has two kinds of characters, that is, Kanji and Kana.
In the first experiment, phonological similarity effect was investigated using Japanese word and non-words. The phonological similarity effect was found. In visual presentation, the effect was also confirmed both in Kanji and Kana.
In the second experiment, while doing reading span task (RST), the subjects used two kinds of strategy. phonological strategy and semantic strategy. The results showed that the subjects with large working memory capacity who got span score in RST (high-span-subjects) depended on semantic strategy and the small working memory capacity subjects who got low span score (low-span-subjects) easily depended on the phonological strategy.
In an event related potential (ERP) research, a priming effect was performed using both semantic priming and phonological priming. The results suggested that semantic priming effect was larger than phonological priming effect in both ERP and reaction time. It was also suggested that semantic priming effect was confirmed in both Kanji and Kana. Moreover, the ERP data indicated that semantic priming effect was found in mainly the frontal region of the brain, which suggest that semantic priming effect is located in the frontal region and controlled by the central executive function of working memory.
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