Individual Differences in Working Memory Capacity and Reasoning Ability

Abstract

Abstract This chapter discusses how a substantial number of studies have shown that working memory capacity (WMC) is the best single predictor identified so far of reasoning ability as measured by intelligence tests. This finding is an important step toward understanding psychometric intelligence in terms of theories from cognitive psychology. The factor-analytic approach to individual differences provides a tool to identify associations and dissociations between indicators of cognitive functions. The approach is to model the correlational structure of a large set of indicators by theoretically specified structural equation models. WMC is found to be related to measures of processing speed. One explanation is that many working memory tasks are complex span tasks that involve a processing component, and the speed of performing this component is one source of variance in complex span tasks. Currently the most successful theory of deductive reasoning is the theory of mental models.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 189 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.