The diversity of strategies used in working memory for colors, orientations, and positions: A quantitative approach to a first-person inquiry

Abstract

The study of individual experience during the performance of a psychological task using a phenomenological approach is a relatively new area of research. The aim of this paper was to combine first- and third-person approaches to investigate whether the strategies individuals use during a working memory task are associated with specific task conditions, whether the strategies combine to form stable patterns, and whether the use of specific strategies is related to task accuracy. Thirty-one participants took part in an experiment in which they were instructed to remember colors, orientations, or positions of stimuli presented in a change detection task. After every few trials, participants took part in an in-depth phenomenological interview in which they described their experiences during the trial that immediately preceded the interview. Qualitative analysis revealed a set of 18 strategies that participants used while performing the task, which we divided into active and passive strategies of encoding, maintenance, and retrieval. Quantitative analysis revealed that while many strategies were used in all task conditions, some strategies and their combinations may be better suited to the specific task demands, while others are more general in nature. The results also suggest a distinction between strategies for encoding object identity and spatial features. Finally, our results did not provide robust evidence for a relationship between specific strategies and task accuracy.

Individual differences in spatial working memory strategies differentially reflected in the engagement of control and default brain networks

“…The specific representations and strategies used depend on several factors, such as the type of information to be retained (Oblak et al, 2022;Slana Ozimič et al, 2023;Starc et al, 2017), the response to be generated (Purg et al, 2022), the predictability of the response (Curtis, 2004;Purg et al, 2022) and the available attention resources (Adam et al, 2015;Starc et al, 2017). Increasingly, research also shows that individuals, even when faced with the same task requirements, may use different representations and strategies to perform the task (e.g., Oblak et al, 2022;Slana Ozimič et al, 2023;Starc et al, 2017). Here, we investigate neural correlates of 40 individual differences in WM strategy use in a large multi-41 study, multi-site dataset of spatial WM performance during task.…”