Shipstead Zach, Harrison Tyler L, Engle Randall W
Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Arizona State University, Glendale, AZ, 85306-4908, USA,
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2015 Aug;77(6):1863-80. doi: 10.3758/s13414-015-0899-0.
Complex span and visual arrays are two common measures of working memory capacity that are respectively treated as measures of attention control and storage capacity. A recent analysis of these tasks concluded that (1) complex span performance has a relatively stronger relationship to fluid intelligence and (2) this is due to the requirement that people engage control processes while performing this task. The present study examines the validity of these conclusions by examining two large data sets that include a more diverse set of visual arrays tasks and several measures of attention control. We conclude that complex span and visual arrays account for similar amounts of variance in fluid intelligence. The disparity relative to the earlier analysis is attributed to the present study involving a more complete measure of the latent ability underlying the performance of visual arrays. Moreover, we find that both types of working memory task have strong relationships to attention control. This indicates that the ability to engage attention in a controlled manner is a critical aspect of working memory capacity, regardless of the type of task that is used to measure this construct.
复杂广度任务和视觉阵列任务是工作记忆容量的两种常见测量方法，它们分别被视为注意力控制和存储容量的测量指标。最近对这些任务的一项分析得出结论：（1）复杂广度任务表现与流体智力的关系相对更强；（2）这是由于人们在执行该任务时需要运用控制过程。本研究通过检验两个大型数据集来考察这些结论的有效性，这两个数据集包含了更多样化的视觉阵列任务以及几种注意力控制测量指标。我们得出结论，复杂广度任务和视觉阵列任务在流体智力中所占的方差量相似。与早期分析的差异归因于本研究对视觉阵列任务表现背后的潜在能力进行了更全面的测量。此外，我们发现这两种工作记忆任务与注意力控制都有很强的关系。这表明，以可控方式运用注意力的能力是工作记忆容量的一个关键方面，无论用于测量这一结构的任务类型如何。
