The current study examines the extent to which multiple factors (

The current study examines the extent to which multiple factors (capacity, attention control, and secondary memory) rather than a single factor account for the relation between WM and gF. Closely following the ideas of Baddeley and Hitch (1974), one of the first theories put forth to explain individual differences in WM and its relation with higher-order cognition suggested that individuals

have a fixed pool of resources which they can allocate to both processing and storage in complex span tasks. In this view complex span tasks measure the dynamic tradeoff between processing and storage and that as the processing click here component becomes more taxing, there are fewer resources left over to store the to-be-remembered (TBR) items (Case et al., 1982, Daneman and Carpenter, 1980, Daneman and Tardif, 1987 and Just and Carpenter, 1992). Thus, the storage score provides an index of how efficiently an individual can process and store information. If a person can efficiently process a lot of information then there will be adequate resources available for storage and hence a high storage score. However, if a person is less efficient at processing information, most of their resources will be devoted to the processing task, leaving Trichostatin A cell line few resources available for storage and hence a low storage score. Furthermore, this view argues that the reason WM (as measured

by complex span tasks) predicts higher-order cognition so well is because WM represents the dynamic tradeoff between processing and storage which is needed in many complex cognitive tasks including measures of gF. As such, resource sharing is thought to underlie individual differences in WM and account for their relation Ibrutinib purchase with higher-order cognition. Problems with resource sharing views are findings that processing and storage can make independent contributions to task performance and to the correlation

with measures of mental abilities (Bayliss et al., 2003, Duff and Logie, 2001, Logie and Duff, 2007, Unsworth et al., 2009 and Waters and Caplan, 1996). That is, although prior work has shown that measures of processing are in fact related to measures of higher-order cognition including measures of gF, WM storage scores still predicted higher-order cognition even after controlling for processing (Bayliss et al., 2003, Engle et al., 1992, Friedman and Miyake, 2004, Unsworth et al., 2005 and Unsworth et al., 2009). Thus, although the relation between processing and storage is important, prior research has demonstrated that variation in processing efficiency or resource sharing does not fully account for the relation between WM (particularly WM storage) and gF. More recent theories of WM have moved away from the idea that resource sharing between processing and storage is what is important, and have instead proposed that individual differences in WM are due to something else.

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