Working memory is the system maintaining information during simultaneous processing.

Evidence

WM can be conceptualised as the cognitive system that is responsible for active maintenance of information in the face of ongoing processing and/or distraction. Its capacity (WMC) is generally assessed by so-called complex span tasks, requiring the temporary storage and simultaneous processing of information. For example, in one of the most widely used WM tasks, the Reading-Span test (Baddeley et al. 1985 ), visually presented sentences have to be read and their semantic correctness judged (processing component), while trying to remember parts of their content for recall after a variable number of sentences (storage component). — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1123

The psychological construct that has received the most attention in the emerging field of cognitive hearing science is working memory (WM), possibly because it has been shown to be involved in a wide range of complex cognitive behaviours (e.g. reading comprehension, reasoning, complex learning). WM can be conceptualised as the cognitive system that is responsible for active maintenance of information in the face of ongoing processing and/or distraction. Its capacity (WMC) is generally assessed by so-called complex span tasks, requiring the temporary storage and simultaneous processing of information. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1125

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Defines working memory and the complex-span task structure used to measure WMC.
• XREF: Connects to cognitive-science material on Baddeley’s model and the ELU model of language understanding.

Related

• Working-memory tasks differ by emphasizing storage versus active manipulation (similarity 0.85)
• Reading-span tasks measure working memory by interleaving comprehension judgments with word recall (similarity 0.82)
• Working-memory and temporal-processing contributions to intelligibility depend on listening conditions. (similarity 0.82)
• Working memory is measured by separate storage-based and manipulation-based cognitive tasks. (similarity 0.82)
• Processing-heavy working memory tasks correlate more strongly with noisy speech perception (similarity 0.81)
• Reading-Span tests score working-memory capacity by final-word recall after plausibility judgments (similarity 0.80)
• Only mismatched speech input triggers effortful working-memory processing. (similarity 0.80)
• Basic storage-based working memory tracks intelligibility more broadly than reading span (similarity 0.80)
• Working-memory capacity predicts speech understanding only in linguistically complex listening tasks (similarity 0.78)
• Working memory compensates for degraded speech coding only when peripheral hearing deteriorates (similarity 0.78)