Content-embedded tasks beat complex span for predicting comprehension

Abstract

Discourse comprehension requires one to process information that is actively maintained in working memory (WM). Therefore, we hypothesized that individual differences in comprehension would be predicted better by working memory tasks that capture the concurrent demands of processing and maintenance of the same memory elements (i.e., content-embedded tasks) than by WM tasks that require the maintenance of an extraneous memory load during processing (e.g., complex span tasks). Two hundred sixty-one undergraduates completed three content-embedded tasks, three complex span tasks, and three measures of comprehension. Results of structural equation modeling indicated that the content-embedded tasks accounted for a greater amount of variance in comprehension than did complex span tasks. Thus, tasks that require one to coordinate the processing and maintenance of task-specific memory elements are preferable for capturing the relationship between WM and comprehension.Keywords Working memory . Complex span . Comprehension . Structural equation modelingText processing is a highly complex cognitive task in that its successful completion depends on the coordinated processing and maintenance of several different kinds of information, including words and the concepts they denote, the syntactic and semantic relationships between words within a sentence, the semantic relationships between ideas within and between sentences, and general world knowledge. Indeed, a widespread assumption among contemporary models of text comprehension is that successful comprehension depends heavily on the effective use of limited working memory (WM) resources (e.g., Goldman, Varma, & Coté, 1996;Graesser, Gernsbacher, & Goldman, 2003;Just & Carpenter, 1992;Kintsch, 1998;Perfetti, 1988;van den Broek, 2010).Consistent with this assumption, research has repeatedly demonstrated that individual differences in WM predict variance in comprehension. The most common approach to measuring WM has involved complex span tasks (see Conway et al., 2005;Kane et al., 2004). For example, Daneman and Carpenter's (1980) original reading span (RSPAN) task required participants to read a series of unrelated sentences aloud, after which they were asked to recall the last word of each sentence. Given concerns that sentence-final words were being generated from recall of the gist of the sentence, rather than from maintenance in working memory (Conway et al., 2005), more recent versions of the RSPAN task typically present an unrelated target (e.g., a word or letter) after each sentence to be maintained for subsequent recall after the end of the sentence set. The operation span (OSPAN) task is conceptually similar, requiring the processing of arithmetic equations along with maintenance of unrelated targets that follow each equation. More generally, complex span measures include both processing and maintenance task components. Of greatest interest for present purposes, a key feature of these measures is that the content to be processed and the content to be maintained...

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