Coordinating information from perception and working memory.

Abstract

Individuals must often coordinate information in working memory with information from perception. The demands of coordination have been analyzed in terms of the cost to switch attention. Coordination is considered in terms of the organization of control processes. Ss in 4 experiments performed list-processing tasks that sometimes required alternation between sets of items that were held in working memory or were currently displayed. Experiment 1 demonstrated that performance was slower and more error-prone when alternating between sets than when reporting a single set. On alternation tasks, latency varied with serial position, indicating that Ss paused between pairs of responses. In Experiment 2, this serial position function was observed for tasks requiring alternation between sets of information in the same modality (memory or perception). Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrate that this effect depends on the requirement to generate a new sequence of responses. A model of control processes for coordination is developed and tested.

Individual and age-related differences in children’s working memory

“…It also differs from the inhibition of irrelevant information view, discussed above. In support of this option, Yee, Hunt, and Pellegrino (1991 ) have argued that complex tasks (i.e., dual-or multipletask situations) are more likely to reflect the coordination of processes than divided attention between competing memory traces (see also Carlson, Wenger, & Sullivan, 1993, for a testing of this notion). Thus, although individual differences in working memory may reflect a situation in which information is poorly encoded and maintained, individual differences also occur in how subjects switch between and coordinate sources of information.…”

“…I believe, however, that the major limitation of this interpretation for the present results is that it does not eliminate a resource-allocation model. This is because one can speculate that resource trade-offs can exist between storage and response execution processes (Carlson et a!., 1993). Simply stated, there is a cost in switching and/or coordinating across multiple memory traces.…”

759Temporal tuning in the acquisition of cognitive skill

“…An interesting possible implication of these findings is that the benefits of consistent sequences of operators or subgoals in mental tasks (Carlson & Lundy, 1992;Wenger & Carlson, 1996) are mediated by temporal tuning.The ability to anticipate upcoming processes may allow for more precise juxtaposition of procedures and operands, resulting in the increased fluency observed in consistent sequence relative to varied sequence conditions. Precise juxtaposition minimizes the need for working memory management and the coordination of information from working memory and perception, which are demanding and time consuming(e.g., Carlson, 1997;Carlson, Wenger, & Sullivan, 1993).…”

The nature of external representations in problem solving

“…It leaves many things unspecified. For example, it does not give any details on how perceptual and cognitive operations are coordinated, which is an interesting issue worth of further research (for a few studies on this issue, see Carlson et al, 1993;Dark, 1990;Weber et al, 1986).…”

“…Although the central control is crucial for problem solving, the current framework does not attempt to specify its details because it is not the current focus. The most important function of the central control that is unique to ER-based problem solving is the coordination of the interplay between perception and cognition: allocating and switching attention between internal and external representations, integrating internal and external information, and coordinating perceptual and cognitive operations (for a few studies on these issues, see Carlson, Wenger, & Sullivan, 1993;Dark, 1990;Weber, Burd, & Noll, 1986).…”