Rough Draft

Annotated Bibliography

Colmar, S., & Double, K. (2017). Working Memory Interventions with Children: Classrooms or Computers? Journal of Psychologists and Counselors in Schools, 27(2), 264-277.

The relevance of a working memory to a classroom has led to the development of various interventions, some of them technological in nature. The main strength of this source is that the interventions designed to improve the working memory of students has been focused on. The authors concentrated on the evidence that was meant to understand the relative effectiveness of classroom using computerized working memory interventions. These interventions bring about positive change that is measurable and sustainable to the classroom via the students. In this regard, this source will provide crucial insight on the best way to intervene in the classroom using technology and improve the working memory type in children. It will, by extension, explain how technology can be used to alter different memory types in the human mind. In the results provided by the study, positive evidence was found to improve the working memory of the entire class through the use of assistive media specifically designed the classroom. These results are crucial to the current study because it closes the discussion on whether working memory can be influenced through technology. The study will focus on other ways other than the working memory that technology can influence human memory.

Van der Roest, H. G., Wenborn, J., Pastink, C., Dröes, R., &Orrell, M. (2017). Assistive technology for memory support in dementia. The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 6CD009627. doi: 10.1002/14651858.CD009627.pub2

Dementia is one of the well-known memory illnesses in the world. The amount of interest that assistive technology has had on dementia has been increasing in the last few years. This source represents this interest. The focus of the authors is to identify how technological devices have been used to improve dementia. Specifically, the authors used Assistive Technology (AT) to map out all the devices that have been used in the treatment of Dementia. The main objective is not only to assess how these devises are used to check and evaluate the user friendliness of these devices. The user friendliness of these devises form an important aspect of understanding how the devices themselves help the dementia victims. This is because the friendlier the devise is to the user the more likely it is that the user understands how the devise is helping them. If not, then it means that they do not understand how the devises are used. These results are crucial to the current study because they will help identify the main ways that assistive technology help people with dementia and by extension how the devises help them specifically.

Nittrouer, S., Caldwell-Tarr, A., Low, K. E., & Lowenstein, J. H. (2017). Verbal Working Memory in Children with Cochlear Implants. Journal of Speech, Language, And Hearing Research, 60(11), 3342-3364.

This source looks into the use of cochlear implants in improving verbal working memory in children. The study used 47 normal hearing children and 46 with cochlear implants. Using a dual-component model, the study established that cochlear implants resulted in phonological awareness. This awareness help the children to understand and recall information through their working memory provided it is received from a verbal source. These results support the idea that assistive technology, using the cochlear implants in this case, are an important part of influencing memory in human beings. This technology helps the children to recall information in an enhanced manner than the normal hearing because it is retained as verbal rather than sight information. Nonetheless, the study identified that the phonological code that is generated by the implants has a negative toll on the working memory. This is because it leads to the inability to retrieve stored details as they were stored using the phonological code that they may have outgrown with time. This negative aspect of technology will be put to the current study that technology has both positive and negative impact on the human memory.

Pak, R., McLaughlin, A. C., Leidheiser, W., &Rovira, E. (2017). The effect of individual differences in working memory in older adults on performance with different degrees of automated technology. Ergonomics, 60(4), 518-532. doi:10.1080/00140139.2016.1189599

The last study aims at explaining why older adults have overdependence on automation in age-related declines particularly when it comes to working memory. The idea that formed the basis of this study was that there were increased studies reporting that higher degrees of automation led to positive performance when the automation was correct while the performance was negative if the automation was incorrect and there were high degrees of it. Specifically, the authors found that in older adults, when the automation was incorrect performed poorly regardless of their working memory status. These results led to the conclusion that automation should be designed for the users with regard to how much they can take and the accuracy of the automation. This study relates to the current study through the automation concept because it involves the use of technology to send assistive signals to the brain for memory improvement. The main weakness of this study was that it did not use empirical data to make the inferences casting doubt as to how the results were obtained. The study, however, provided important insight on the need for the study to focus on the amount of technology used and the accuracy it has in targeting human memory. These are important aspects to be considered when looking at how memory works subject to technology.