Citation

Janczyk M, Grabowski J. Memory 2011; 19(2): 211-225.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology III, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany. markus.janczyk@uni-wuerzburg.de

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/09658211.2010.546803

PMID

21287425

Abstract

Three experiments examined the cognitive costs of item switching within working memory with a novel word updating task, thereby extending previous research to the field of linguistic stimuli and linguistic-graphemic updating operations. In Experiments 1 and 2 costs for switching between working memory items were evident on the word level, and they increased with an increasing word set size (Experiment 2). In contrast, a surprisingly similar switch effect on the level of letters was not affected by word set size (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 showed that this effect is not simply based on the need for re-orienting visual spatial attention. To account for the overall picture of results, a recursive model of attentional foci is proposed. Moreover, individual working memory span appears to be associated with the accuracy of item switching, but not with its speed.

Language: en