Abstract
To the extent that individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) reflect differences in attention (Baddeley, 1993; Engle, Kane, & Tuholski, 1999), differences in WMC should predict performance on visual attention tasks. Individuals who scored in the upper and lower quartiles on the OSPAN working memory test performed a modification of Egly and Homa’s (1984) selective attention task. In this task, the participants identified a central letter and localized a displaced letter flashed somewhere on one of three concentric rings. When the displaced letter occurred closer to fixation than the cue implied, high-WMC, but not low-WMC, individuals showed a cost in the letter localization task. This suggests that low-WMC participants allocated attention as a spotlight, whereas those with high WMC showed flexible allocation.
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Data for this study were collected at the University of Oklahoma, where M.M.K.’s participation was funded by NSF REU Grant SES-9820689 to F.T.D.
Note—This article was accepted by the previous editorial team, while John T. Wixted was editor.
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Bleckley, M.K., Durso, F.T., Crutchfield, J.M. et al. Individual differences in working memory capacity predict visual attention allocation. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 10, 884–889 (2003). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196548
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196548