ERIC Number: EJ1056496
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2014-May
Pages: 17
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0278-7393
EISSN: N/A
Working Memory Updating Latency Reflects the Cost of Switching between Maintenance and Updating Modes of Operation
Kessler, Yoav; Oberauer, Klaus
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, v40 n3 p738-754 May 2014
Updating and maintenance of information are 2 conflicting demands on working memory (WM). We examined the time required to update WM (updating latency) as a function of the sequence of updated and not-updated items within a list. Participants held a list of items in WM and updated a variable subset of them in each trial. Four experiments that vary the number of to-be-updated and to-be-maintained items, as well as their positions in the list, are reported. The pattern of latencies was best explained by a model assuming forward scanning of the list, updating modified items, and maintaining nonmodified items. Switching between updating and maintenance incurred a response time cost, which increased with overall set-size. The formation of new item-position associations accounted for an additional response time component. The finding of an update-switch cost provides novel behavioral support for a class of physiologically inspired computational models, in which updating and maintenance require 2 different states of WM.
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Short Term Memory, Undergraduate Students, Reaction Time, Cognitive Processes, Experimental Psychology, Regression (Statistics), Hypothesis Testing, Task Analysis, Statistical Analysis, Recall (Psychology), Correlation, Experiments
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Israel
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A