Working Memory Capacity in Hot and Cold Cognition (Chapter 2) - Cognitive Limitations in Aging and Psychopathology (original) (raw)

Summary

Much has been said about the relationship between measures of Working Memory Capacity (WMC) and higher order cognition. Indeed, what exactly accounts for this relationship has been a major topic of inquiry in cognitive psychology for over 20 years (Engle & Oransky, 1999). Attempts to better understand this problem have shed considerable light on the role of WMC in a wide array of research domains. Specifically, research has shown that measures of WMC are related to complex learning (Kyllonen & Stephens, 1990), following directions (Engle, Carullo, & Collins, 1991), reasoning ability (Engle, Tuholski, Laughlin, & Conway, 1999; Kyllonen & Christal, 1990), and vocabulary learning (Daneman & Green, 1986). Additionally, not only has WMC been implicated in higher order cognition – indeed, these correlations point to the utility of such a concept in the first place – but also now WMC is being implicated in other research domains. Working memory measures not only predict reading comprehension scores (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980), performance on standard achievement tests (i.e., SAT: Engle et al., 1999), and reasoning, but also seem to predict early onset Alzheimer's (Rosen, Bergeson, Putnam, Harwell, & Sunderland, 2002), the effects of alcohol consumption (Finn, 2002), and one's ability to deal with life-event stress (Klein & Boals, 2001). Thus, the utility of WMC is not merely limited to performance on high-level cognitive tasks, but is also important in a variety of situations that impact people on a day-to-day basis.

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