Does process overlap theory replace the issues of general intelligence with the issues of attentional control?

Schubert, Anna‐Lena; Rey-Mermet, Alodie

doi:10.1016/j.jarmac.2019.06.004

Cited by 19 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 61 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Even when imperfect reliability estimates were taken into account by disattenuating the correlation matrix, we were still unable to establish a coherent inhibition construct. These results are in line with recent studies highlighting the difficulty of establishing inhibition as a coherent latent construct [11,32,39,69]. In particular, they are in line with the studies in which the inhibition factor does not represent much common variances across the different measures because it had very large residual variances [e.g., 11,20,27,29,31] and one high factor loading dominating the remaining low factor loadings [see, e.g., 11,20,23,24,31,36].…”

Section: The Difficulty Of Establishing Inhibition As a Latent Variablesupporting

confidence: 91%

Removal of information from working memory is not related to inhibition

Rey-Mermet¹,

Singh²,

Ge³

et al. 2020

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Working memory (WM) is a system for maintenance of and access to a limited number of goal-relevant representations in the service of higher cognition. Because of its limited capacity, WM requires interference-control processes, allowing us to avoid being distracted by irrelevant information. Recent research has proposed two interference-control processes, which are conceptually similar: (1) an active, item-wise removal process assumed to remove no-longer relevant information from WM, and (2) an inhibitory process assumed to suppress the activation of distractors against competing, goal-relevant representations. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which removal and inhibition are the same construct. Results showed acceptable to good reliabilities for nearly all measures. Similar to previous studies, a structural equation modeling approach identified a reliable latent variable of removal. However, also similar to some previous studies, no latent variable of inhibition could be established. This was the case even when the correlation matrix used to compute the latent variable of inhibition was disattenuated for imperfect reliability. Critically, the individual measures of inhibition were unrelated to the latent variable of removal. These results provide tentative support for the notion that removal is not an inhibitory process. This suggests that the removal process should be conceptualized as a process independent of inhibition, as proposed in computational WM models that implement removal as the “unbinding” of a WM item from the context in which it occurred.

show abstract

Section: The Difficulty Of Establishing Inhibition As a Latent Variablesupporting

confidence: 91%

Removal of information from working memory is not related to inhibition

Rey-Mermet¹,

Singh²,

Ge³

et al. 2020

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Even when imperfect reliability estimates were taken into account by disattenuating the correlation matrix, we were unable to establish a coherent inhibition construct. These results are in line with recent studies highlighting the difficulty of establishing inhibition as a coherent latent construct [ 11 , 32 , 39 , 69 ]. In particular, they are in line with the studies in which the inhibition factor does not represent much common variances across the different measures because it had very large residual variances [e.g., 11 , 20 , 27 , 29 , 31 ] and one high factor loading dominating the remaining low factor loadings [see, e.g., 11 , 20 , 23 , 24 , 31 , 36 ].…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

“…Inhibition was measured using tasks that are broadly (though not universally) assumed to require inhibition and were used in previous individual-differences research [e.g., 11 , 13 , 32 , 38 ]. Given that, as reviewed above, previous investigations have reported difficulties establishing inhibition at the latent-variable level [see 39 , for an overview] and measures of inhibition are known to be associated with imperfect reliability [e.g., 20 , 27 , 40 , 41 ], we also conducted a CFA on a correlation matrix disattenuated for imperfect reliability in order to increase the chances of observing a coherent latent variable of inhibition [ 42 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interference control in working memory: Evidence for discriminant validity between removal and inhibition tasks

et al. 2020

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Working memory (WM) is a system for maintenance of and access to a limited number of goal-relevant representations in the service of higher cognition. Because of its limited capacity, WM requires interference-control processes, allowing us to avoid being distracted by irrelevant information. Recent research has proposed two interference-control processes, which are conceptually similar: (1) an active, item-wise removal process assumed to remove no-longer relevant information from WM, and (2) an inhibitory process assumed to suppress the activation of distractors against competing, goal-relevant representations. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which the tasks used to assess removal and inhibition measure the same interference-control construct. Results showed acceptable to good reliabilities for nearly all measures. Similar to previous studies, a structural equation modeling approach identified a reliable latent variable of removal. However, also similar to some previous studies, no latent variable of inhibition could be established. This was the case even when the correlation matrix used to compute the latent variable of inhibition was disattenuated for imperfect reliability. Critically, the individual measures of inhibition were unrelated to the latent variable of removal. These results provide tentative support for the notion that removal is not related to the interference-control processes assessed in inhibition tasks. This suggests that the removal process should be conceptualized as a process independent of the concept of inhibition, as proposed in computational WM models that implement removal as the “unbinding” of a WM item from the context in which it occurred.

show abstract

“…At first glance, individual differences research was successful in establishing attentional control as a latent variable (e.g., Engle et al, 1999;Miyake et al, 2000). However, recent research has put this conclusion into question (see Rey-Mermet et al, 2019;Schubert & Rey-Mermet, 2019;von Bastian et al, 2020, for overviews). First, in some studies, attentional-control tasks did not correlate consistently with each other (e.g., De Simoni & von Bastian, 2018;Guye & von Bastian, 2017;Paap & Greenberg, 2013;von Bastian et al, 2016), and in some cases they failed to load on a factor (Klauer et al, 2010;Krumm et al, 2009) or they had to be merged with other tasks to load on a factor (e.g., Brydges et al, 2012;Hedden & Yoon, 2006;Klauer et al, 2010;van der Sluis et al, 2007).…”

Section: Why Is It Difficult To Establish Attentional Control At the mentioning

confidence: 99%

Neither measurement error nor speed-accuracy trade-offs explain the difficulty of establishing attentional control as a psychometric construct: Evidence from a latent-variable analysis using diffusion modeling

Rey-Mermet¹,

Singmann²,

Oberauer³

2021

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Attentional control refers to the ability to maintain and implement a goal and goal-relevant information when facing distraction. So far, previous research has failed to substantiate strong evidence for a psychometric construct of attentional control. This has been argued to result from two methodological shortcomings: (a) the neglect of individual differences in speed-accuracy trade-offs when only speed or accuracy is used as dependent variable, and (b) the difficulty of isolating attentional control from measurement error. To overcome both issues, we combined hierarchical-Bayesian Wiener diffusion modeling with structural equation modeling. We re-analyzed the dataset from Rey-Mermet, Gade, and Oberauer (2018), which includes data from a large set of attentional-control tasks from young and older adults. Even when accounting for speed-accuracy trade-offs and removing measurement error, measures of attentional control failed to correlate with each other and to load on a latent variable. These results emphasize the necessity of rethinking attentional control.

show abstract

Does process overlap theory replace the issues of general intelligence with the issues of attentional control?

Cited by 19 publications

References 61 publications

Removal of information from working memory is not related to inhibition

Removal of information from working memory is not related to inhibition

Interference control in working memory: Evidence for discriminant validity between removal and inhibition tasks

Neither measurement error nor speed-accuracy trade-offs explain the difficulty of establishing attentional control as a psychometric construct: Evidence from a latent-variable analysis using diffusion modeling

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About