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Mnemonic strategies can facilitate working memory performance, but our knowledge on strategy use as a function of task characteristics remains limited. We examined self-reported strategy use in several working memory tasks with pretest data from two large-scale online training experiments. A three-level measure of strategy sophistication (no strategy, maintenance, manipulation) was coded based on participants' open-ended strategy reports. A considerable portion of participants reported some memory strategy, and strategy sophistication was associated with objective task performance. We found a consistent effect of stimulus type: verbal stimuli (letters or digits) elicited higher strategy sophistication than nonverbal ones (colours or spatial positions). In contrast, the association between task paradigm and strategy sophistication was less consistent in the two experiments. The present results highlight the importance of self-generated strategies in understanding individual differences in working memory performance and the role of stimulus characteristics as one of the task-related determinants of strategy use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recently developed virtual reality task, EPELI (Executive Performance in Everyday LIving), quantifies goal-directed behavior in naturalistic conditions. Participants navigate a virtual apartment, performing household chores given by a virtual character. EPELI aims to tap attention, executive function, and prospective memory. To ensure its applicability to further research and clinical work and to study its relationship to relevant background factors, we examined several key properties of EPELI in 77 typically developing 9–13-year-old children. These included EPELI's internal consistency, age and gender differences, sensitivity to gaming experience, head-mounted display (HMD) type, and verbal recall ability, as well as its relationships with parent-rated everyday executive problems. Of the eight EPELI measures, the following six showed acceptable internal consistency: task and navigation efficacy, number of correctly performed tasks and overall actions, time monitoring, and controller movement. Some measures were associated with age, gender, or verbal encoding ability. Moreover, EPELI performance was associated with parent-rated everyday executive problems. There were no significant associations of gaming background, task familiarity, or HMD type with the EPELI measures. These results attest to the reliability and ecological validity of this new virtual reality tool for the assessment of attention, executive functions, and prospective memory in children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diagnosis of ADHD is based on real-life attentional-executive deficits, but they are harder to detect in adults than in children and objective quantitative measures reflecting these everyday problems are lacking. We developed an online version of EPELI 3D videogame for naturalistic and scalable assessment of goal-directed action and prospective memory in adult ADHD. In EPELI, participants perform instructed everyday chores in a virtual apartment from memory. Our pre-registered hypothesis predicted weaker EPELI performances in adult ADHD compared to controls. The sample comprised 112 adults with ADHD and 255 neurotypical controls comparable in age (mean 31, SD = 8 years), gender distribution (71% females) and educational level. Using web-browser, the participants performed EPELI and other cognitive tasks, including Conner's Continuous Performance Test (CPT). They also filled out questionnaires probing everyday executive performance and kept a 5-day diary of everyday prospective memory errors. Self-reported strategy use in the EPELI game was also examined. The ADHD participants' self-ratings indicated clearly more everyday executive problems than in the controls. Differences in the EPELI game were mostly seen in the ADHD participants' higher rates of task-irrelevant actions. Gender differences and a group × gender interaction was found in the number of correctly performed tasks, indicating poorer performance particularly in ADHD males. Discriminant validity of EPELI was similar to CPT. Strategy use strongly predicted EPELI performance in both groups. The results demonstrate the feasibility of EPELI for online assessment and highlight the role of impulsivity as a distinctive everyday life problem in adult ADHD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We studied orienting and maintenance of spatial attention in audition and vision. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in nine healthy subjects revealed activations in the same superior and inferior parietal, and posterior prefrontal areas in the auditory and visual orienting tasks when these tasks were compared with the corresponding maintenance tasks. Attention-related activations in the thalamus and cerebellum were observed during the auditory orienting and maintenance tasks and during the visual orienting task. In addition to the supratemporal auditory cortices, auditory orienting, and maintenance produced stronger activity than the respective visual tasks in the inferior parietal and prefrontal cortices, whereas only the occipital visual cortex and the superior parietal cortex showed stronger activity during the visual tasks than during the auditory tasks. Differences between the brain networks involved in auditory and visual spatial attention could be, for example, due to different encoding of auditory and visual spatial information or differences in stimulus-driven (bottom-up triggered) and voluntary (top-down controlled) attention between the auditory and visual modalities, or both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]