Assessing Working Memory Capacity for 21

As the United States mobilized for the war in Europe a century ago, its Army faced a formidable challenge at home : how to efficiently and effectively assess the mental abilities of millions of prospective recruits ? The solution to this problem, in the form of the group-administered cognitive ability test, would not only revolutionize military personnel selection, but subsequently also applicant evaluation and selection across government departments, civilian industries, universities, and even prospective combatants for an entirely different battlefield : the National Football League (NFL). 1 Cognitive ability tests, and in particular the mass-testing variety, were deemed “the most practical contribution made to humanity by all of psychology” (e.g., Anastasi & Urbina, 1997 ; Cronbach, 1960). And perhaps because of this success, the cognitive ability tests used in personnel selection contexts today remain highly redolent, with respect to their form and content, of their century-old archetypes – which were designed as they were for ease of administration and scoring in the pre-computer era. Certainly, the early general cognitive ability tests were developed in the absence of a guiding theory of human cognition (Mackintosh, 2011), and subsequent tests were validated against their predecessors, culminating in a century of often derivative measures. This is not to say that group tests of general cognitive ability are not useful predictors of job performance ; however, the rise of cognitive psychology in the last quarter of the 20 th century bestowed a new framework from which to better understand human cognition and to develop improved tests thereof – a fact that, interestingly, has done little to influence the course of the group testing juggernaut.