A model comparison approach reveals individual variation in the scope and control of attention
- PDF / 518,448 Bytes
- 8 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 70 Downloads / 197 Views
BRIEF REPORT
A model comparison approach reveals individual variation in the scope and control of attention Daniel Schor 1 & Alex S. Brodersen 1 & Bradley S. Gibson 1
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract The maintenance capacity of working memory is known to be severely limited in scope. However, the reason this capacity varies across individuals remains unknown because it has proven difficult to estimate the maximum capacity of an individual’s “scope of attention” (SoA) separate from their ability to achieve this maximum capacity due to temporary lapses in “attention control” (AC). The present study accomplished this separation by using a maximum likelihood framework to extract latent constructs representing SoA and AC from a whole-report version of the visual-array task. The results of two experiments (N = 145 and N = 189) showed that model fit was significantly greater when the model allowed both AC and SoA to vary across individuals relative to a model in which only AC was allowed to vary (and SoA was fixed). More importantly, the individual estimates of SoA and AC derived from this variable model suggested that (1) the observed range of SoA was found to be small across individuals, with 91% able to maintain a maximum of 3 or 4 items; (2) the consistency with which AC could be deployed was only weakly correlated with the magnitude of SoA; and (3) AC and SoA were both found to be significant predictors of fluid intelligence. Altogether, the present study clarified the nature of maintenance capacity and suggested that SoA and AC both need to be included in a mechanistic account of complex cognition. Keywords Working memory capacity . Attention control . Scope of attention . Visual array task . Fluid intelligence . Latent variable model
A fundamental goal of cognitive science is to provide a mechanistic account of mental abilities. One common approach to this endeavor has been to specify how complex cognition arises from more primitive sources (Kyllonen & Christal, 1990). For the past several decades, working memory (WM) was considered to be one of the most important building blocks of higher-order cognition (Chuderski, Taraday, Nęcka, & Smoleń, 2012; Shipstead, Redick, Hicks, & Engle, 2012). In general, WM has been defined as a collection of processes responsible for temporarily maintaining the mental representations used in higher-level thought and action (Oberauer et al. 2018). As this definition suggests, however, Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-020-01744-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Bradley S. Gibson [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, 390 Corbett Hall, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA
it has become increasingly clear that WM is itself a complex form of cognition whose functioning is determined by a collection of more basic mechanisms (Shipstead, Lindsey, Marshall, & Engle, 2014; Unsworth, Fukuda, Awh, & Vogel, 2014). For instance, one of the benchmark
Data Loading...
