Keeping track of variables that have few or many states.

Abstract

This article describes further experiments on keeping track of several variables. The 5 is read a series of messages, each of which tells him that one of the variables is, and until further notice will remain, in some particular state. At random intervals the series of messages is interrupted and 5 is asked what the present state of one of the variables is.The problem considered here is how the fraction of the questions answered correctly depends on the number of states that each variable may assume. Keeping track of variables that have the same set of possible states has been shown to be different from keeping track of variables that have their own exclusive states (Yntema & Mueser, 1960); so it was decided that the effect of number of states should be examined in both situations. It was also decided that the probability that a message would change the variable to which it referred should be held constant while the number of possible states was varied. Preliminary experiments had shown that the task is especially difficult when a large fraction of the messages are changes. METHODThree experiments were done to investigate the effect of number of states in a variety of cases. The experiments were much alike in plan, differing chiefly in the number of variables whose states S was to remember, and in whether the variables had the same or different possible states.

Working memory span tasks: A methodological review and user’s guide

“…Thus, the subjects retain only the most recent n items that are presented and continuously drop items from the maintenance/rehearsal set once the list length exceeds n. Similarly, the keeping-track task (Yntema & Mueser, 1960, 1962) presents a list of items, of unknown length and from n categories (the memory load), and subjects retain only the most recent exemplar of each category. Finally, the n-back task (Kirchner, 1958;Mackworth, 1959;Moore & Ross, 1963) presents a list of items in which the subject must continuously report whether each item matches the one that had appeared n items ago in the stream (n typically ranges from 1 to 4).…”

Declarative and Procedural Working Memory: Common Principles, Common Capacity Limits?

“…This implies partially or completely removing the current contents from the direct-access region or the bridge, and replacing them with new ones. On the declarative side, updating has been studied with a number of paradigms like the "memory updating" task (ecker, Lewandowsky, Oberauer, & Chee, 2010;Oberauer & Vockenberg, 2009), in which participants update a list of digits or letters through arithmetic operations, or the "keeping track task" (Yntema & Mueser, 1962) in which participants see a long list of nouns from different categories and must remember the last noun of each category. updating of procedural working memory means to update the current task set, a process intensely investigated in recent years with the task-switching paradigm (for review see Monsell, 2003).…”

“…The first factor refers to inhibition of strong but wrong action tendencies in tasks such as the Stroop or the antisaccade paradigm, and it corresponds to the protection from interference in procedural working memory in my taxonomy. updating refers to updating the contents of declarative working memory, measured by tasks such as the keep-track task (Yntema & Mueser, 1962). Shifting refers to the task switching paradigm, which in my taxonomy represents updating of procedural working memory.…”

The components of working memory updating: An experimental decomposition and individual differences.

“…One of the first experiments on WM updating was conducted by Yntema and Mueser (1962), who presented subjects with a long list of words and asked people to remember the last exemplar in each of a varying number of categories. In the related running memory task, subjects are asked to recall the last n items of a long list.…”