Table 1.
Processing Outcomes Associated With Working Memory Capacity (WMC)
| Processing outcome | Representative citation |
|---|---|
| Activation effects | |
| Latency and frequency of generating exemplars from a category | Rosen & Engle (1997) |
| Speed and probability of successfully retrieving goal-relevant information | Daily, Lovett, & Reder (2001) |
| Resisting interference effects | |
| “Fan” interference | Conway & Engle (1994) |
| Negative priming | Conway, Tuholski, Shisler, & Engle (1999) |
| Proactive interference | Kane & Engle (2000); Rosen & Engle (1998) |
| Retroactive interference | Rosen & Engle (1997) |
| Distracting information with physical similarities to target information | Tuholski, Engle, & Baylis (2001) |
| Suppression effects | |
| Monitoring prior responses and suppressing repetitive exemplars in category fluency task | Rosen & Engle (1997) |
| Resisting the lure of a powerful orienting cue (e.g., dichotic listening task) | Conway, Cowan, & Bunting (2001) |
| Resisting attention-capturing peripheral visual cue (e.g., antisaccade task) | Kane, Bleckley, Conway, & Engle (2001) |
| Inhibiting prepotent automatic or habitual responses (e.g., Stroop task) | Kane & Engle (2003) |
| Age-related declines in ability to suppress “automatic” processing in dual-process models | Chiappe, Hasher, & Siegel (2000); Hasher & Zacks (1988) |
| Thought suppression | Brewin & Beaton (2002) |
| Suppression of counterfactual thoughts | Goldinger, Kleider, Azuma, & Beike (2003) |
| Age-related declines in ability to inhibit stereotype use | von Hippel, Silver, & Lynch (2000) |
| Processing strategies (low vs. high WMC) | |
| Automatic spreading activation vs. controlled attention in category fluency task (e.g., category fluency task) | Rosen & Engle (1997) |
| Quick to respond, relying on automatic parsing vs. slow to respond, maintaining multiple interpretations (e.g., syntactically ambiguous sentences) | MacDonald, Just, & Carpenter (1992) |
| Drawing inferences earlier vs. later in the process (e.g., when reading difficult, ambiguous prose) | Whitney, Ritchie, & Clark (1991) |
| Cognitive miser vs. motivated tactician | cf. Fiske & Taylor (1991); Taylor (1981) |
| Learning and memory | |
| Construction of mental representations that support new learning | Cantor & Engle (1993) |
| Rule-based learning (in comparison with associative learning) | E. R. Smith & DeCoster (2000) |
| Encoding of new information | Rosen & Engle (1997) |
| Establishing coherence between various parts of a text during the comprehension process | Budd, Whitney, & Turley (1995) |
| Real-world cognitive tasks | |
| Reading comprehension | Daneman & Carpenter (1980, 1983); Daneman & Merikle (1996) |
| Language comprehension | Just & Carpenter (1992); King & Just (1991); MacDonald et al. (1992) |
| Listening comprehension and problem solving | Adams & Hitch (1997); Carpenter, Just, & Shell (1990) |
| Reasoning | Kyllonen & Christal (1990) |
| Adapting strategies to changing success rates | Schunn & Reder (2001) |
| Vocabulary learning | Daneman & Green (1986) |
| Spelling | Ormrod & Cochran (1998) |
| Following directions | Engle, Carullo, & Collins (1991) |
| Logic learning | Kyllonen & Stephens (1990) |
| Taking lecture notes | Kiewra & Benton (1988) |
| Writing | Benton, Kraft, Glover, & Plake (1984) |
| Storytelling | Pratt, Boyes, Robins, & Manchester (1989) |
| Emotional processing | Bliss-Moreau et al. (2003) |
| Ability to reason, solve novel problems, and adapt to new situations | Conway, Cowan, Bunting, Therriault, & Minkoff (2002); Engle, Tuholski, Laughlin, & Conway (1999); Kyllonen & Christal (1990) |