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Miller (1956) summarized evidence that people can remember about seven chunks in short-term memory (STM) tasks. However, that number was meant more as a rough estimate and a rhetorical device than as a real capacity limit. Others have since suggested that there is a more precise capacity limit, but that it is only three to five chunks. The present target article brings together a wide variety of data on capacity limits suggesting that the smaller capacity limit is real. Capacity limits will be useful in analyses of information processing only if the boundary conditions for observing them can be carefully described. Four basic conditions in which chunks can be identified and capacity limits can accordingly be observed are: (1) when information overload limits chunks to individual stimulus items, (2) when other steps are taken specifically to block the recoding of stimulus items into larger chunks, (3) in performance discontinuities caused by the capacity limit, and (4) in various indirect effects of the capacity limit. Under these conditions, rehearsal and long-term memory cannot be used to combine stimulus items into chunks of an unknown size; nor can storage mechanisms that are not capacity-limited, such as sensory memory, allow the capacity-limited storage mechanism to be refilled during recall. A single, central capacity limit averaging about four chunks is implicated along with other, noncapacity-limited sources. The pure STM capacity limit expressed in chunks is distinguished from compound STM limits obtained when the number of separately held chunks is unclear. Reasons why pure capacity estimates fall within a narrow range are discussed and a capacity limit for the focus of attention is proposed.

People prefer to lie using altered truthful events from memory, perhaps because doing so can increase their credibility while reducing cognitive and working memory (WM) load. One possible way to counter such deceptive behavior is to track WM usage, since fabricating coherent lies or managing between truth and lies is likely to involve heavy WM load. In this study, participants memorized a list of words in the study session and used these old words to provide deceptive answers when cued later, in the testing session. Our behavioral results showed that people needed more time to make a deceptive response during the execution stage, and this prolonged deceptive reaction time (RT) was negatively correlated with each participant’s WM capacity. Event-related potential findings showed a more negative-going frontal amplitude between the lie and truth conditions during the preparation stage, suggesting that WM preparatory processes can be detected long before a deceptive response is verbalized. Furthermore, we observed a larger positive frontal-central amplitude during the execution stage, which was negatively correlated with participants’ lie–truth RT differences, suggesting that participants’ efficiency in producing deceptive responses can be readily traced electrophysiologically. Together, these findings suggest that WM capacity and preparation are crucial to efficient lying and that their related electrophysiological signatures can potentially be used to uncover deceptive behaviors.

Working memory (WM) has been found to play a major role in learning L2 grammar (Li et al., 2019). However, there is little research into the longitudinal effects of phonological short-term memory and WM capacity on L2 grammar knowledge development (Sagarra, 2017). The current longitudinal study investigated the relationship between phonological short-term memory, WM capacity, and the development of L2 grammar knowledge over the period of two years. This report is part of an ongoing larger-scale study including the components of reading, writing, and speaking. Participants were 107 Year 1, 2, and 3 Polish university students majoring in English as an L2. The measurements included two phonological short-term memory capacity tests, two WM capacity tests, and four tests of grammar knowledge. The results indicated that grammar tests correlated with nonword, listening, and reading spans. However, latent growth models showed that only WM capacity positively predicted changes in L2 grammar knowledge over time.

Working memory storage capacity is important because cognitive tasks can be completed only with sufficient ability to hold information as it is processed. The ability to repeat information depends on task demands but can be distinguished from a more constant, underlying mechanism: a central memory store limited to 3 to 5 meaningful items for young adults. I discuss why this central limit is important, how it can be observed, how it differs among individuals, and why it may exist.

Working memory capacity is an important psychological construct, and many real-world phenomena are strongly associated with individual differences in working memory functioning. Although working memory and attention are intertwined, several studies have recently shown that individual differences in the general ability to control attention is more strongly predictive of human behavior than working memory capacity. In this review, we argue that researchers would therefore generally be better suited to studying the role of attention control rather than memory-based abilities in explaining real-world behavior and performance in humans. The review begins with a discussion of relevant literature on the nature and measurement of both working memory capacity and attention control, including recent developments in the study of individual differences of attention control. We then selectively review existing literature on the role of both working memory and attention in various applied settings and explain, in each case, why a switch in emphasis to attention control is warranted. Topics covered include psychological testing, cognitive training, education, sports, police decision-making, human factors, and disorders within clinical psychology. The review concludes with general recommendations and best practices for researchers interested in conducting studies of individual differences in attention control.

Given that the ability to attend to a task without distraction underlies performance in a wide variety of contexts, training one's ability to stay on task should result in a similarly broad enhancement of performance. In a randomized controlled investigation, we examined whether a 2-week mindfulness-training course would decrease mind wandering and improve cognitive performance. Mindfulness training improved both GRE reading-comprehension scores and working memory capacity while simultaneously reducing the occurrence of distracting thoughts during completion of the GRE and the measure of working memory. Improvements in performance following mindfulness training were mediated by reduced mind wandering among participants who were prone to distraction at pretesting. Our results suggest that cultivating mindfulness is an effective and efficient technique for improving cognitive function, with wide-reaching consequences.

Visual working memory is the cognitive system that holds visual information active to make it resistant to interference from new perceptual input. Information about simple stimuli—colors and orientations—is encoded into working memory rapidly: In under 100 ms, working memory ‟fills up,” revealing a stark capacity limit. However, for real-world objects, the same behavioral limits do not hold: With increasing encoding time, people store more real-world objects and do so with more detail. This boost in performance for real-world objects is generally assumed to reflect the use of a separate episodic long-term memory system, rather than working memory. Here we show that this behavioral increase in capacity with real-world objects is not solely due to the use of separate episodic long-term memory systems. In particular, we show that this increase is a result of active storage in working memory, as shown by directly measuring neural activity during the delay period of a working memory task using EEG. These data challenge fixed-capacity working memory models and demonstrate that working memory and its capacity limitations are dependent upon our existing knowledge.

The attentional blink (AB) is a well-established phenomenon in the study of attention. This deficit in reporting the second of two targets presented in rapid serial visual presentation when it occurs 200-500 ms after the first is considered to reflect a fundamental limitation in attentional processing. However, we recently reported that some individuals do not show an AB, and presented psychophysiological evidence that target processing differs between blinkers and non-blinkers. One possibility is that non-blinkers may have a larger WM capacity, allowing better attentional control. Here we explore the relation between the magnitude of the AB, general intelligence, and different measures of working memory (WM) and short-term memory (STM) capacity. Surprisingly, no correlation was found between memory capacity measures and AB magnitude, raising doubts about the generalizability of earlier findings of such a relationship.

Working memory capacity and fluid intelligence have been demonstrated to be strongly correlated traits. Typically, high working memory capacity is believed to facilitate reasoning through accurate maintenance of relevant information. In this article, we present a proposal reframing this issue, such that tests of working memory capacity and fluid intelligence are seen as measuring complementary processes that facilitate complex cognition. Respectively, these are the ability to maintain access to critical information and the ability to disengage from or block outdated information. In the realm of problem solving, high working memory capacity allows a person to represent and maintain a problem accurately and stably, so that hypothesis testing can be conducted. However, as hypotheses are disproven or become untenable, disengaging from outdated problem solving attempts becomes important so that new hypotheses can be generated and tested. From this perspective, the strong correlation between working memory capacity and fluid intelligence is due not to one ability having a causal influence on the other but to separate attention-demanding mental functions that can be contrary to one another but are organized around top-down processing goals.

The capacity of visual working and visual long-term memory plays a critical role in theories of cognitive architecture and the relationship between memory and other cognitive systems. Here, we argue that before asking the question of how capacity varies across different stimuli or what the upper bound of capacity is for a given memory system, it is necessary to establish a methodology that allows a fair comparison between distinct stimulus sets and conditions. One of the most important factors determining performance in a memory task is target/foil dissimilarity. We argue that only by maximizing the dissimilarity of the target and foil in each stimulus set can we provide a fair basis for memory comparisons between stimuli. In the current work we focus on a way to pick such foils objectively for complex, meaningful real-world objects by using deep convolutional neural networks, and we validate this using both memory tests and similarity metrics. Using this method, we then provide evidence that there is a greater capacity for real-world objects relative to simple colors in visual working memory; critically, we also show that this difference can be reduced or eliminated when non-comparable foils are used, potentially explaining why previous work has not always found such a difference. Our study thus demonstrates that working memory capacity depends on the type of information that is remembered and that assessing capacity depends critically on foil dissimilarity, especially when comparing memory performance and other cognitive systems across different stimulus sets.