Individual differences in working memory capacity and attentional control.

Abstract

Visual working memory (WM) has a very limited online capacity making it considerably important to control the gating of encoding into WM. Recent studies have suggested that attention control is of importance in doing so, especially the time needed to disengage. However, the disengagement mechanism operates on a later stage of processing after the initial selection of information has already been initiated. We assume that individual differences in WM capacity are also driven by individual variations in the voluntary engagement of attention. In 2 experiments we investigated whether individuals with high- and low-WM capacity differ in the efficiency and speed of this attention control process. We realised different versions of the task in which different amounts of attention control were necessary, a more automatically triggered allocation of attention and a voluntary initiation of attention engagement, respectively. We further manipulated the time course to look for differences in the latency of attention control. The results revealed that participants with low-WM capacity were less effective to exhibit voluntary attention control processes and they were also slower in doing so compared with high-WM capacity individuals. However, this effect seems to be partly moderated by the ability to update the current task set. If the trial structure did not require task set updating smaller individual differences involving WM capacity could be found.

Understanding Mood of the Crowd with Facial Expressions: Majority Judgment for Evaluation of Statistical Summary Perception

“…Focusing on the number of faces calculated for statistical summary perception, we examined relationships between the performance of this and visual working memory (VWM) in this experiment. VWM is associated with attentional control and executive function (Adam et al, 2015 ; Hiebel & Zimmer, 2015 ), and a previous study suggests that attentional control accounts for ensemble performance (Myczek & Simon, 2008 ). The perception of statistical summary of complicated objects such as facial expression could also be associated with this function.…”

The Benefits of Working Memory Capacity on Attentional Control under Pressure

“…In Experiment 1, we divided participants into low- and high-WMC group based on OSPAN scores, just like most of previous studies (e.g., Conway et al, 2001; Kane et al, 2001; Unsworth et al, 2004; Colflesh and Conway, 2007; Fukuda and Vogel, 2011; Furley and Memmert, 2012; Hiebel and Zimmer, 2015; Wood et al, 2015). However, one shortcoming of these studies (including Experiment 1) was that researchers did not manipulate WMC directly (they divided participants into low- and high-WMC groups based on original WMC rather than directly manipulate WMC), which relied heavily on samples, and it was not enough to infer the relationship between WMC and attentional control.…”

“…The controlled attention view of WMC proposed that high-WMC individuals are generally better able to maintain top–down attentional control and remain focused, whereas low-WMC individuals are likely to experience failures in goal maintenance due to their inability to inhibit distraction or interference (Kane et al, 2001; Engle, 2002; Barrett et al, 2004; Unsworth et al, 2004). There are numerous studies using various paradigms support this prediction (e.g., Kane et al, 2001; Unsworth et al, 2004; Colflesh and Conway, 2007; Fukuda and Vogel, 2011; Furley and Memmert, 2012; Hiebel and Zimmer, 2015). …”