Simple and complex memory spans and their relation to fluid abilities: Evidence from list-length effects☆
Section snippets
Memory spans, the capacity of primary memory, and retrieval from secondary memory
We view working memory as consisting of a subset of activated long-term memory units, some of which are highly active and are in primary memory. This conceptualization is similar to Cowan’s model of the focus of attention (1995), with Craik’s early work distinguishing between primary and secondary memory (e.g., Craik, 1971, Craik and Levy, 1976), to the episodic buffer postulated by Baddeley (2000), and the direct access region in Oberauer’s model (2002). However, our view is probably most
Participants
The data analyzed in the current study were from a large correlation-based study with 235 adults between the ages of 18–35 that has been published previously (i.e., Kane et al., 2004). Participants were both college students and community volunteers from a combination of three universities and metropolitan areas (see Kane et al., 2004, for more details). None of the analyses reported in this paper were reported in the Kane et al. (2004) study.
Tasks
Participants completed a number of complex span,
Results
The results are divided into three sections, the first section deals with the probability of correct recall as a function of list-length. The second section deals with correlational results of complex and simple spans with fluid abilities as a function of list-length. Finally, the third section examines individual estimates of primary memory and their unique and shared effects in predicting fluid abilities. For all analyses, the two complex spans were combined, the two simple spans were
Discussion
The present investigation examined the predictive utility of verbal simple and complex span tasks in predicting higher-order cognition in terms of list-length effects. In the introduction, we suggested that one main difference between these tasks is the extent to which items are displaced from primary memory and must be retrieved from secondary memory. We argued that the ability to actively retrieve items from secondary memory is one important reason for the predictive power of the complex span
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We thank Nelson Cowan, Rich Heitz, Tom Redick, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. We also thank Josh Holt and Liz Weldon for data scoring assistance.