Working memory capacity and retrieval from long-term memory: the role of controlled search

Abstract

In two experiments, the role of working memory capacity (WMC) in the controlled search of long-term memory was examined. Participants performed a prolonged category fluency task that required them to retrieve as many animals as possible in 5 min. The results suggested that WMC differences arose in the numbers of animals retrieved, the numbers of clusters retrieved, and the rates of the retrieval (Exp. 1). However, no differences were found in terms of how participants initiated retrieval or in the nature of the clusters generated. Furthermore, an examination of differences in retrieval strategies suggested that high-WMC individuals were more strategic than low-WMC individuals and that these differences in retrieval strategies accounted for the overall differences in the numbers of animals retrieved. Additionally, presenting participants with retrieval cues eliminated WMC differences in the numbers of animals retrieved (Exp. 2). These results suggest that low-WMC individuals are less able than high-WMC individuals to select and utilize appropriate retrieval strategies to self-generate cues to access information in long-term memory. Collectively, the results are consistent with research suggesting that WMC is important for controlled search from long-term memory.

Pillars of judgment: How memory abilities affect performance in rule-based and exemplar-based judgments.

“…Evidence from individual difference studies suggests that working memory correlates with performance in long-term memory tasks (Del Missier et al, 2013;Mogle, Lovett, Stawski, & Sliwinski, 2008;Unsworth, 2010). Specifically, working memory may control encoding into and strategic retrieval from long-term memory (Baddeley, Lewis, Eldridge, & Thomson, 1984;Craik, Govoni, Naveh-Benjamin, & Anderson, 1996;Rosen & Engle, 1997;Unsworth, Brewer, & Spillers, 2013).…”

Remotely Close Associations: Openness to Experience and Semantic Memory Structure

“…Verbal fluency associations are likely driven by associative and executive processes. For example, verbal fluency represents a structured form of recall that involves executive processes such as controlled and strategic search (Unsworth, Brewer, & Spillers, 2013, 2014. In comparison, free recall of associations related to a target word might rely on more associative processes because knowledge of a specific category is not required.…”

Overcoming duality: the fused bousfieldian function for modeling word production in verbal fluency tasks

“…Furthermore, it addresses the Befficiency problem.R egarding the modeling of the FBF, our approach was again based on a method ascribed to Bousfield (i.e., the sampling-with-replacement model). The latter takes into account processes of lexical search, retrieval, and suppression (Bousfield & Cohen, 1953b;Bousfield & Sedgewick, 1944;Raaijmakers & Shiffrin, 1980;Roediger & Tulving, 1979;Rohrer, 1996Rohrer, , 2002Shiffrin, 1970;Unsworth et al, 2013;Unsworth & Engle, 2007). Expanding it for the FBF suggested the mental processing of highly dimensional lexical conglomerations rather than that of single items, with α representing the degree of their relatedness.…”

“…Accordingly, the effort to constantly activate new and unrelated lexical entries (Robinson, Shallice, Bozzali, & Cipolotti, 2012), while suppressing automatically coactivated items (Binder et al, 2009;Hickok & Poeppel, 2007;Jackson et al, 2015), should bring about an increasing prefrontal executive involvement. However, empirical data typically contain production spurts indicative of additional facilitatory effects that can be ascribed to coactivation (Foygel & Dell, 2000;Raaijmakers & Shiffrin, 1980;Rohrer, 1996Rohrer, , 2002Shiffrin, 1970;Unsworth, Brewer, & Spillers, 2013;Unsworth & Engle, 2007;Vonberg et al, 2014). In this sense, the concomitant suppressing of potentially advantageous associations in the course of VF may also lead to an impoverishment of Baccess ways^to further suitable words leading to a greater retrieval effort (i.e., longer IRTs).…”

“…On this basis, a large number of further refinements have been elaborated to extend the description and modeling of lexical memory functions (Bauml et al, 2005;Bousfield & Cohen, 1953a;Herrmann & Chaffin, 1976;Herrmann & Murray, 1979;Indow & Togano, 1970;Kaplan, Carvella, & Metlay, 1969;Luo, Luk, & Bialystok, 2010; D. J. Meyer et al, 2012;Raaijmakers & Shiffrin, 1980;Rhodes & Turvey, 2007;Rohrer, 1996Rohrer, , 2002Rohrer et al, 1995;Shiffrin, 1970;Shiffrin & Atkinson, 1969;Unsworth, Brewer, & Spillers, 2013;Unsworth & Engle, 2007;Young, 2004) (for a review see . In so doing, respective theories have typically linked mathematically identified parameters to presumed language functions.…”