Individual differences in working memory capacity and the regulation of arousal
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Individual differences in working memory capacity and the regulation of arousal Matthew K. Robison1
· Gene A. Brewer1
© The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Previously it has been theorized that differential functioning of the locus coeruleus–norepinephrine (LC–NE) system affects people’s ability to regulate arousal, which has impacts on cognitive abilities. In the present study, we investigated three potential mechanisms by which the LC–NE system can fail to regulate arousal appropriately: hypoarousal, hyperarousal, and dysregulation of arousal. Each of these three could potentially account for why arousal affects cognition. To test the contributions of these three mechanisms, the present study examined individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) and the regulation of arousal using pupillometry. Participants completed multiple complex span and visual arrays change-detection measures of WMC. An eye-tracker recorded pupil diameter as participants completed the visual arrays tasks. We found rather mixed evidence for the three mechanisms. Arousal dysregulation correlated with lower visual arrays performance and more self-reported attentional lapses. However, arousal regulation did not correlate with complex span performance. There was also some evidence for hypoarousal as an explanatory mechanism, as arousal correlated with attentional lapses. We discuss the implications of the results for theories regarding the role of arousal regulation in cognitive performance and individual differences in cognitive abilities. Keywords Working memory capacity · Attention control · Arousal · Locus coeruleus · Norepinephrine Working memory capacity (WMC), the ability to maintain, manipulate, and retrieve goal-relevant information, is a core cognitive construct. Decades of research have reinforced this idea, demonstrating that individual differences in WMC correlate with important outcomes like fluid intelligence (Conway, Cowan, Bunting, Therriault, & Minkoff, 2002; Engle, Tuholski, Laughlin, & Conway, 1999; Kane et al., 2004; Kyllonen & Christal, 1990), reading comprehension (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980; McVay & Kane, 2012b; Unsworth & McMillan, 2013), learning (Kyllonen & We would like to thank Alaina Dettmer, Haitham Shakir, Cyril Abadir, Kameron Moore, Taylor Rhea, and Fransisco Herold for their assistance with data collection. We would also like to thank Nash Unsworth and Jason Tsukahara for their helpful commentary on earlier versions of this manuscript. Finally, we would like to thank Stephen Goldinger for providing the equipment necessary to complete this project. The authors were funded by National Science Foundation grant 1632327. Matthew K. Robison
[email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, 950 S. McAllister Ave., Tempe, AZ 85287, USA
Stephens, 1990; Unsworth & Engle, 2005), and academic aptitude tests (Engle et al., 1999; Unsworth et al., 2012a, b). A great deal of research has investigated precisely why WMC predicts such a wide variety of outcomes. According to th
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