Individual differences in working memory capacity and long-term memory: The influence of intensity of attention to items at encoding as measured by pupil dilation
Ashley L.Miller, Marina P.Gross, Nash Unsworth
Ashley L.Miller, Marina P.Gross, Nash Unsworth
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"Pupil dilation at encoding partly explained the WMC-long term memory relationship."
"The present study used pupil dilation as an index of the intensity of attention to determine if variation in attention at encoding partially accounts for the relation between working memory capacity (WMC) and long-term memory (LTM). ... Overall, results support the notion that high WMC individuals outperform low WMC individuals in delayed free recall, which is partly explained by the amount of attention devoted to items at encoding."
"Taken altogether, it appears that WMC is related to the intensity of attention at encoding, but this relation is small. Thus, while the intensity of attention is one source of variation explaining why high WMC individuals outperform low WMC individuals in delayed free accuracy, the relation between WMC and LTM is largely driven by other factors—such as search efficiency (Miller and Unsworth, in press, Unsworth and Engle, 2007, Unsworth, 2007) and variation in monitoring abilities (Unsworth & Brewer, 2010). Nonetheless, the current study contributes to the literature by demonstrating that WMC related differences in pupillary responses at encoding appear to be driven by the amount of resources available for processing items, as well as the strategic allocation of those resources. Given their excess capacity, high WMC individuals appear to process the entire word list as a single entity. That is, high WMC individuals may incorporate each subsequent word into an ongoing strategy. On the other hand, people with low WMC seemingly compensate for a lack of available resources by selectively focusing their attention on what they deem to be the most valuable items (see also Middlebrooks, Kerr, & Castel, 2017). These results suggest that attentional processes operating at encoding must be taken into consideration when trying to better elucidate reasons for which some individuals (e.g., people with high WMC) are better able to recall items from LTM than others."
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