Updating of information in working memory: Time course and consequences.

Working memory updating is the process that replaces outdated content in working memory by new content. This requires removing outdated information and encoding new information. It is still unclear whether removal and encoding run sequentially or simultaneously.

The brief mind wandering three-factor scale (BMW-3).

In recent years, researchers from different fields have become increasingly interested in measuring individual differences in mind wandering as a psychological trait. Although there are several questionnaires that allow for an assessment of people's perceptions of their mind wandering experiences, they either define mind wandering in a very broad sense or do not sufficiently separate different aspects of mind wandering. Here, we introduce the Brief Mind Wandering Three-Factor Scale (BMW-3), a 12-item questionnaire available in German and English.

Older yet sharp: No general age-related decline in focusing attention.

Attention is a multifaceted mechanism operating on space, features, and memory. Previous studies reported both decline and preservation of attention in aging. Yet, it is unclear if healthy aging differentially affects attentional selection in these domains.

Removing information from working memory with a delay: Effective but not beneficial.

Ideally, removing outdated information from working memory (WM) should have two consequences: The removed content should be less accessible (removal costs), and other WM content should benefit from the freeing up of WM capacity (removal benefits). Robust removal benefits and removal costs have been demonstrated when people are told to forget items shortly after they were encoded (immediate removal). However, other studies suggest that people might be unable to selectively remove items from an already encoded set of items (delayed removal).

When Load is Low, Working Memory is Shielded From Long-Term Memory's Influence.

Previous studies found that episodic long-term memory (eLTM) enhances working memory (WM) performance when both novel and previously learnt word pairs must be retained on a short-term basis. However, there is uncertainty regarding how and when WM draws on eLTM. Three possibilities are (a) that people draw on eLTM only if WM capacity is exceeded; (b) that there is a contribution of eLTM to WM performance, irrespective of whether prior knowledge is helpful or not; or (c) benefits of prior knowledge are specific to comparisons between conditions which are similarly ambiguous concerning whether LTM may be useful.

The common factor of executive functions measures nothing but speed of information uptake.

There is an ongoing debate about the unity and diversity of executive functions and their relationship with other cognitive abilities such as processing speed, working memory capacity, and intelligence. Specifically, the initially proposed unity and diversity of executive functions is challenged by discussions about (1) the factorial structure of executive functions and (2) unfavorable psychometric properties of measures of executive functions. The present study addressed two methodological limitations of previous work that may explain conflicting results: The inconsistent use of (a) accuracy-based vs.

A diffusion model analysis of age and individual differences in the retro-cue benefit.

The limited capacity of working memory (WM) constrains how well we can think and act. WM capacity is reduced in old age, with one explanation for this decline being a deficit in using attention to control WM contents. The retro-cue paradigm has been used to examine the ability to focus attention in WM.

Individual differences in updating are not related to reasoning ability and working memory capacity.

Previous research assumes that executive functions such as inhibition, shifting, and updating explain individual differences in cognitive abilities. Of these three executive functions, updating was previously found to relate most strongly to fluid intelligence. However, this relationship could be a methodological artifact: Measures of inhibition and shifting usually isolate the contribution of this executive function to performance by contrasting conditions with high and low demands on these processes, whereas updating is measured by overall accuracy in working memory tasks involving updating.

Do Attentional Lapses Account for the Worst Performance Rule?

The worst performance rule (WPR) describes the phenomenon that individuals' slowest responses in a task are often more predictive of their intelligence than their fastest or average responses. To explain this phenomenon, it was previously suggested that occasional lapses of attention during task completion might be associated with particularly slow reaction times. Because less intelligent individuals should experience lapses of attention more frequently, reaction time distribution should be more heavily skewed for them than for more intelligent people.

In Search of the Executive Cognitive Processes Proposed by Process-Overlap Theory.

Process-Overlap Theory (POT) suggests that measures of cognitive abilities sample from sets of independent cognitive processes. These cognitive processes can be separated into domain-general executive processes, sampled by the majority of cognitive ability measures, and domain-specific processes, sampled only by measures within a certain domain. According to POT, fluid intelligence measures are related because different tests sample similar domain-general executive cognitive processes to some extent.

Intelligence test items varying in capacity demands cannot be used to test the causality of working memory capacity for fluid intelligence.

There is a strong relationship between fluid intelligence and working memory capacity (WMC). Yet, the cognitive mechanisms underlying this relationship remain elusive. The capacity hypothesis states that this relationship is due to limitations in the amount of information that can be stored and held active in working memory.

Diffusion modeling and intelligence: Drift rates show both domain-general and domain-specific relations with intelligence.

Several previous studies reported relationships between speed of information processing as measured with the drift parameter of the diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978) and general intelligence. Most of these studies utilized only few tasks and none of them used more complex tasks. In contrast, our study ( = 125) was based on a large battery of 18 different response time tasks that varied both in content (numeric, figural, and verbal) and complexity (fast tasks with mean RTs of ca.

Disentangling the Effects of Processing Speed on the Association between Age Differences and Fluid Intelligence.

Several studies have demonstrated that individual differences in processing speed fully mediate the association between age and intelligence, whereas the association between processing speed and intelligence cannot be explained by age differences. Because measures of processing speed reflect a plethora of cognitive and motivational processes, it cannot be determined which specific processes give rise to this mediation effect. This makes it hard to decide whether these processes should be conceived of as a cause or an indicator of cognitive aging.

Cognitive Models in Intelligence Research: Advantages and Recommendations for Their Application.

Mathematical models of cognition measure individual differences in cognitive processes, such as processing speed, working memory capacity, and executive functions, that may underlie general intelligence. As such, cognitive models allow identifying associations between specific cognitive processes and tracking the effect of experimental interventions aimed at the enhancement of intelligence on mediating process parameters. Moreover, cognitive models provide an explicit theoretical formalization of theories regarding specific cognitive processes that may help in overcoming ambiguities in the interpretation of fuzzy verbal theories.

The validity of the online thought-probing procedure of mind wandering is not threatened by variations of probe rate and probe framing.

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the measurement of mind wandering during ongoing tasks. The frequently used online thought-probing procedure (OTPP), in which individuals are probed on whether their thoughts are on-task or not while performing an ongoing task, has repeatedly been criticized, because variations in the frequency of thought probes and the order in which on-task and off-task thoughts are referred to have been shown to affect mind-wandering rates. Hitherto, it is unclear whether this susceptibility to measurement variation only affects mean response rates in probe-caught mind wandering or poses an actual threat to the validity of the OTPP, endangering the replicability and generalizability of study results.

Is general intelligence little more than the speed of higher-order processing?

Individual differences in the speed of information processing have been hypothesized to give rise to individual differences in general intelligence. Consistent with this hypothesis, reaction times (RTs) and latencies of event-related potential have been shown to be moderately associated with intelligence. These associations have been explained either in terms of individual differences in some brain-wide property such as myelination, the speed of neural oscillations, or white-matter tract integrity, or in terms of individual differences in specific processes such as the signal-to-noise ratio in evidence accumulation, executive control, or the cholinergic system.