An empirical test of the independence between declarative and procedural working memory in Oberauer’s (2009) theory

Abstract

It has recently been suggested that working memory could be conceived as two symmetrical subsystems with analogous structure and processing principles: a declarative working memory storing objects of thought available for cognitive operations, and a procedural working memory holding representations of what to do with these objects (Oberauer, Psychology of learning and motivation 51: 45-100, 2009). Within this theoretical framework, the two subsystems are thought to be independent and fueled by their own capacity. The present study tested this hypothesis through two experiments using a complex span task in which participants were asked to maintain consonants for further recall while performing response selection tasks. In line with Oberauer's conception, the load of the procedural working memory was varied by manipulating the number of stimulus-response mappings of the response selection task. Increasing the number of these mappings had a strong detrimental effect on recall performance. Besides contradicting Oberauer's proposal, this finding supports models that assume a resource-sharing between processing and storage in working memory.

The Role of Executive Control in Resolving Grammatical Number Conflict in Sentence Comprehension

“…Previous research has shown that in contrast to simple reaction time tasks (e.g., respond with a keypress when a sound occurs), choice reaction time tasks (e.g., press one key when a high tone occurs, and press another key when the tone is low) tax executive control (e.g., Szmalec, Vandierendonck, & Kemps, 2005) and therefore can be used to interfere with sentence processing at a specific processing phase. Many studies have shown that when more or more difficult choice reaction tasks have to be executed during the retention interval of a serial short-term memory task, recall is more impaired than when fewer or less difficult choice tasks are performed (Barrouillet, Bernardin, & Camos, 2004; Barrouillet, Bemardin, Portrat, Vergauwe, & Camos, 2007; Barrouillet & Camos, 2010; Barrouillet, Corbin, Dagry, & Camos, 2015; Barrouillet, Lépine, & Camos, 2008; Barrouillet, Portrat, & Camos, 2011; Barrouillet, Portrat, Vergauwe, Diependaele, & Camos, 2011). As these effects are observed both when the choice tasks are in the same modality and when they are in a different modality from the memory tasks, it is clear that these effects are not due to domain-specific overlaps (Vergauwe, Barrouillet, & Camos, 2009, 2010).…”

An investigation of children’s working memory capacity for task rules

“…Using this method, Gade et al (2014) found no substantial cross-task load effects, consistent with Oberauer's (2009) independence hypothesis. In contrast, Barrouillet et al (2015) found that adults' performance on a (declarative) complex span task was affected by the procedural complexity of the concurrent processing task. Hence, their results argue against Oberauer's independence hypothesis.…”

“…In psychology experiments, people's ability to maintain and execute procedural representations has been investigated using choice reaction time tasks, in which participants are instructed to respond to one of several stimuli using a set of stimulus-response (S-R) mappings or "task rules". In research with adults, the increase in reaction time (RT) with the number of S-R mappings (also known as Hick's law; Hick, 1952;Hyman, 1953) is seen as evidence of a limited working memory capacity for task rules (Barrouillet, Corbin, Dagry & Camos, 2015;Gade, Druey, Souza & Oberauer, 2014;Van 't Wout, 2018). Importantly, RT set-size effects are only obtained for tasks that are currently relevant or operative, and not for other potentially relevant tasks that are currently not active (Hübner, Kluwe, Luna-Rodriguez & Peters, 2004;Van 't Wout, Lavric & Monsell, 2015).…”

“…Whereas the former makes (declarative) representations available for processing; the latter enables processing through the representation and selection of procedures. The assumption that declarative and procedural working memory are separate subsystems with distinct capacity limits has been investigated by two adult studies, with mixed results (Barrouillet, Corbin, Dagry & Camos, 2015;Gade, Druey, Souza & Oberauer, 2014). Both of these studies employed a paradigm in which procedural and declarative working memory load was varied orthogonally.…”

Formation of abstract task representations: Exploring dosage and mechanisms of working memory training effects

“…In designing our study, we considered Oberauer (2009) who suggested a distinction between procedural and declarative working memory processing. Declarative working memory was suggested to hold representations relevant to knowledge and facts (based on stimulusstimulus associations), while procedural working memory was proposed to hold action rules (Oberauer et al, 2013;Souza et al, 2012; but see Barrouillet, Corbin, Dagry, & Camos, 2014 for different results). Training studies have mainly explored declarative working memory processing (e.g., N-back, Span tasks), where participants are asked to memorized the presentation order of a stimulus set (i.e., stimulus-location associations).…”