Discover Top Posts Tagged with #sequential processing

Did you know…

…if you struggle with reading eye charts because you may see the first letter, not see the second letter, and you struggle to process the rest of them, your brain may process linerally.

Neurotypicals process information sequentially. They’ll just state the letters in the order they process them (of course, eye charts are made with neurotypicals in mind).

Autistics (and possibly others) tend to process information not in the order our eyes can visually see them but in the order they are in the row. I often struggle processing either the second or third letter and due to liner processing, my brain can’t make out the rest of them either. My eye doctor has shifted to showing only one letter at a time to accommodate for this to get a more accurate sense of my vision.

This may explain why if I lose my place while reading mid paragraph, I have to go back to the beginning and start over. I can’t just think “Oh what was the last thing I read” to figure out where I was because my mind doesn’t think like that. If I happen to know what line I was on, I may be able to figure out where I was on that line by looking for the start of the next sentence.

So if a neurotypical was watching a screen and the words “cat” “ant” “bug” flashed on the screen then were presented as “bug” “cat” “ant” and the person was asked which order they came in, they could flip them around to the order that was flashed on the screen.

I’d be distracted by the fact that “cat” doesn’t belong in that group.

#actuallyautistic #autism #liner processing #sequential processing

A study shows that, when remembering a sequence of events, the brain focuses on the event paid the least attention, rather than replaying the events in the order they occurred. This finding suggests that attention during the initial encoding of a memory influences how information is manipulated in working memory.

The study is specifically about remembering a sequence of events. Participants were neurotypicals, and ADHD wasn’t discussed. However, people with ADHD have difficulty using attention and working memory. So, the findings suggest that people with ADHD might be bad, or at least inconsistent, at accurately remembering sequences of events.

Participants were shown a short series of images and asked to remember the perspective from which they were shown, and the spatial location in which they were presented. (These sorts of visual-spatial judgments would be really hard for me, and anyone else with difficulties perceiving and visualizing location and spatial relationships). Because timing of brain activity was more important than its location, but both mattered, the researchers recorded brain activity using magnetoencephalography (MEG), an almost real-time method that records electromagnetic signals from the brain.

(TANGENT: I’m curious whether remembering a sequence of events would be easier or harder than remembering a bunch of simultaneous events, where you’re dealing with an attention and working memory bottleneck. Or maybe it depends on the person. And whether simultaneous or sequential processing is easier for us might help explain why some of us need to multitask to focus on anything, and others can only do one thing at a time).

The study does have one implication that could help people with ADHD improve their memory, though:

“The authors found that the image that generated the weakest response in the brain during encoding was most strongly replayed during the delay period. This result may indicate that the brain addresses the limitations of working memory capacity by focusing on the event that requires the most effort to remember.“

In other words, people with ADHD can compensate for our limited working memory by focusing more on what requires most effort to remember, and letting the rest go. Using this strategy does require us to be able to control our attention, at least for a short time, so it won‘t always work for everyone. But it might help to know you don’t have to pay attention to everything, and neurotypicals don’t either.

Citation/Link for the study: Anna Jafarpour, Will Penny, Gareth Barnes, Robert T. Knight, Emrah Duzel. Working-Memory Replay Prioritizes Weakly Attended Events. eneuro, 2017; ENEURO.0171-17.2017 DOI: 10.1523/ENEURO.0171-17.2017

#reblog #queue #original post #actually adhd #research #disability research #neuroscience #cognitive neuroscience #attention #working memory #memory #executive function #executive functioning #sequential processing #sequencing #science writing

What is Sequential Processing and Sequential Computing ?

🧠 What is Sequential Processing? Sequential processing is a way of executing tasks one after another, in order. Sequential processing refers to the execution of tasks or instructions in a specific order, where each task is completed before moving on to the next one. It is a fundamental concept in computing and programming. Each step must finish before the next one begins. 🔹 Simple…