Which working memory functions predict intelligence?
Section snippets
Method
The present data come from the study first reported in Oberauer et al. (2003). That report focused exclusively on the structure of WMC.
Results
We analyzed the data through a series of structural equation models (the full correlation matrix is given in the Appendix A). First, separate measurement models for intelligence and for the WMC and supervision variables were established. Intelligence was modeled by four correlated factors representing the functional factors of the BIS (Fig. 1, left). The measurement model for WMC and supervision (Fig. 1, right) was the one presented in Oberauer et al. (2003). We explored two ways of specifying
Discussion
Our results provide strong evidence for the hypothesis that the common variance of WMC and reasoning centrally includes the ability to form new structural representations (Oberauer et al., 2007). The RI tasks were explicitly constructed to capture this construct, and they have proven to be at least as good as dual-task combinations of storage and concurrent processing in predicting reasoning. The predictive power of RI was retained even with tasks that did not require any storage in the
Acknowledgement
The research reported in this article was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, grant WI 1390/1).
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