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A working memory test battery for MATLAB

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Abstract

We present a battery of four working memory tasks that are implemented using MATLAB and the free Psychophysics Toolbox. The package includes preprocessing scripts in R and SPSS to facilitate data analysis. The four tasks consist of a sentence-span task, an operation-span task, a spatial short-term memory test, and a memory updating task. These tasks were chosen in order to provide a heterogeneous set of measures of working memory capacity, thus reducing method variance and tapping into two content domains of working memory (verbal, including numerical, vs. spatial) and two of its functional aspects (storage in the context of processing and relational integration). The task battery was validated in three experiments conducted in two languages (English and Chinese), involving more than 350 participants. In all cases, the tasks were found to load on a single latent variable. In a further experiment, the latent working memory variable was found to correlate highly but not perfectly with performance on Raven’s matrices test of fluid intelligence. We suggest that the battery constitutes a versatile tool to assess working memory capacity with either English- or Chinese-speaking participants. The battery can be downloaded from www.cogsciwa.com (“Software” button).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia

    Stephan Lewandowsky & Ullrich K. H. Ecker

  2. University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Klaus Oberauer

  3. Research Center of Mind, Brain, and Learning and Department of Psychology, National Cheng-Chi University, No. 64, Sec. 2, ZhiNan Rd., Wenshan District, 11605, Taipei City, Taiwan (R.O.C.)

    Lee-Xieng Yang

Authors
  1. Stephan Lewandowsky
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  2. Klaus Oberauer
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  3. Lee-Xieng Yang
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  4. Ullrich K. H. Ecker
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lee-Xieng Yang.

Additional information

Preparation of this article was facilitated by a Discovery Grant from the Australian Research Council and an Australian Professorial Fellowship to the first author.

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Lewandowsky, S., Oberauer, K., Yang, LX. et al. A working memory test battery for MATLAB. Behavior Research Methods 42, 571–585 (2010). https://doi.org/10.3758/BRM.42.2.571

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