A Presentation on The "Multiply Determined" Nature of WM and Attention Tasks

In this presentation (PDF version), I describe a few theoretical perspectives which ascribe unique roles to executive function and working memory, and briefly cover a wealth of evidence on how at least two distinct sources of variance contribute to Stroop and WM task performance.

In this context, I review results from Kane & Engle 2003 and Hester & Garavan 2005, which can be interpreted to also suggest that at least two distinct mechanisms are at work in tasks like Stroop, operation span, simple word judgments, and task-switching.

FYI, the purpose of this presentation is to provide enough information to the audience so they can decide whether K&E and H&G's conclusions are warranted, rather than to propose a particular view of interactions between attention & memory.