Two experiments aimed at investigating how working memory capacity (WMC) related to processing wh-extractions in both a grammatical judgment and a translation task by using the Operation Span task. A self-paced paradigm was used to collect response times and accuracy rates. In Experiment 1, results showed that high WMC was related to faster grammatical judgment of the critical region in subject...

The authors addressed whether individual differences in the working memory capacity (WMC) of young adults influence susceptibility to false memories for nonpresented critical words in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott associative list paradigm. The results of 2 experiments indicated that individuals with greater WMC recalled fewer critical words than individuals with reduced WMC when participants we...

Two datasets of 110 young adults were examined to investigate the relationship between individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) and dynamic cognitive control. The results delve into the specific differences between high- and low-WMC individuals' ability to enact and maintain cognitive control using the AX version of the continuous performance test (AX-CPT). Compared to high-WMC i...

An experience-sampling study of 124 undergraduates, pretested on complex memory-span tasks, examined the relation between working memory capacity (WMC) and the experience of mind wandering in daily life. Over 7 days, personal digital assistants signaled subjects eight times daily to report immediately whether their thoughts had wandered from their current activity, and to describe their psychol...

The ability to temporarily maintain information in order to successfully perform a task is important in many daily activities. However, the ability to quickly and accurately update existing mental representations in distracting situations is also imperative in many of these same circumstances. In the current studies, individuals varying in working memory capacity (WMC) performed different varie...

We used an enumeration task to address the question of whether acute alcohol intoxication reduces cognitive or perceptual capacity. To control for individual differences in resources, we took a sober record each participant’s working memory capacity (WMC). Alcohol was expected impair performance, either automatic parallel counting small stimulus sets indicating impairment, controlled estimating...

Variation in working-memory capacity (WMC) predicts individual differences in only some attention-control capabilities. Whereas higher WMC subjects outperform lower WMC subjects in tasks requiring the restraint of prepotent but inappropriate responses, and the constraint of attentional focus to target stimuli against distractors, they do not differ in prototypical visual-search tasks, even thos...

Individuals low in working memory capacity (WMC) exhibit impaired performance on a variety of cognitive control tasks. The executive-attention theory of WMC (Engle & Kane, 2004) accounts for these findings as failures of goal maintenance and response conflict resolution. Similarly, the context-processing view (Braver et al., 2001) provides an explanation of cognitive control deficits observed i...

a r t i c l e i n f o The association between working memory capacity (WMC) and fluid intelligence (g f) has been described as substantial and important. In a recent investigation, Gignac (2014a) contended that WMC and g f share closer to 60% of their variance, rather than the commonly cited 50%, based on an analysis of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale—IV (Wechsler, 2008) normative sample ...

1 It is important to understand the role of individual differences in working memory capacity 2 (WMC). We investigated the relation between differences in WMC and N1 in event-related 3 brain potentials as a measure of early selective attention for an auditory distractor in 4 three-stimulus oddball tasks that required minimum memory. A high-WMC group (n = 13) 5 showed a smaller N1 in response to...