Working Memory and Attentional Control Abilities Predict Individual Differences in Visual Long-Term Memory Tasks

Abstract

Working memory abilities predict various cognitive abilities, such as gF and source memory, suggesting that these cognitive processes relied on working memory and attentional control resources. When attentional resources were occupied by a secondary task, previous research showed that source memory performance was less impaired than recognition memory, implying that working memory abilities would not influence, or at least exerted much less influence on recognition memory performance than source memory performance. Here, we directly tested if working memory and attentional control differences predict visual recognition memory performance across four experiments (n = 841 in total). Surprisingly, we found that working memory and attentional control predicted source nearly always predicted recognition memory performance as robust as source memory (Exp 1, 3 and 4), except when rapid presentation rate overflowed working memory capacities (Exp 2), refuting our earlier hypothesis. Additionally, source memory and recognition memory, despite of different presentation rates across experiments, remained highly correlated across individuals. Our findings suggested that visual long-term memory generally required working memory and attentional control resources.