Detection of the Number of Changes in a Display in Working Memory

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition memory, and cognition, 2016-02, Vol.42 (2), p.169-185
• Main Authors: Cowan, Nelson, Hardman, Kyle, Saults, J. Scott, Blume, Christopher L., Clark, Katherine M., Sunday, Mackenzie A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Attention; Auditory Stimuli; Awareness; Cognition & reasoning; College Students; Color; Correlation; Experimental Psychology; Female; Goodness of Fit; Human; Human Channel Capacity; Humans; Individual Differences; Judgment; Male; Mathematical Modeling; Mathematical Models; Memory; Memory, Short-Term; Metacognition; Models, Psychological; Photic Stimulation; Psychological Tests; Short Term Memory; Visual Perception; Visual Stimuli
• ISSN: 0278-7393; 1939-1285
• DOI: 10.1037/xlm0000163

Here we examine a new task to assess working memory for visual arrays in which the participant must judge how many items changed from a studied array to a test array. As a clue to processing, on some trials in the first 2 experiments, participants carried out a metamemory judgment in which they were to decide how many items were in working memory. Trial-to-trial fluctuations in these working memory storage judgments correlated with performance fluctuations within an individual, indicating a need to include trial-to-trial variation within capacity models (through either capacity fluctuation or some other attention parameter). Mathematical modeling of the results achieved a good fit to a complex pattern of results, suggesting that working memory capacity limits can apply even to judgments that involve an entire array rather than just a single item that may have changed, thus providing the expected conscious access to at least some of the contents of working memory.