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The continuous flow of information in which we are immersed obliges our cognitive system to maintain accessible the relevant elements for the time necessary for their processing. The present study investigated how working memory balances the resource demands of this necessary storage in the face of demanding processing. In four experiments using a complex span task, we examined the residual performance in memory and processing of individuals who performed at their best in the other component. Reciprocal dual-task costs pointed toward a resource sharing between the two functions. However, whereas prioritizing processing almost abolished participants' memory performance, more than 60% of their processing capacities were preserved while maintaining memory performance at span. We argue that this asymmetry might be adaptive in nature. Working memory might have evolved as an action-oriented system in which short-term memory capacity is structurally limited to spare the resources needed for processing the information it holds. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

How working memory supports dual-task performance is the focus of a long-standing debate. Most previous research on this topic has focused on participant performance data. In three experiments, we investigated whether changes in participant-reported strategies across single- and dual-task conditions might help resolve this debate by offering new insights that lead to fruitful integration of theories rather than perpetuating debate by attempting to identify which theory best fits the data. Results indicated that articulatory suppression was associated with reduced reports of the use of rehearsal and clustering strategies but to an increase of the reported use of a visual strategy. Elaboration and clustering strategies were reported less for memory under dual task compared with single task. Under both dual task and articulatory suppression, more participants reported attempting to remember fewer memory items than were presented (memory reduction strategy). For arithmetic verification, articulatory suppression and dual task resulted in a reduction in reports of a counting strategy and an increase in reports of a retrieval strategy for arithmetic knowledge. It is argued that experimenters should not assume that participants perform the same task in the same way under different experimental conditions and that carefulty investigation of how participants change their strategies in response to changes in experimental conditions has considerable potential for resolving theoretical challenges. It is argued further that this approach points toward the value of attempting to integrate rather than proliferate theories of working memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Several working memory (WM) theories assume a resource sharing between the maintenance of information and its processing, whereas other theories suppose that these 2 functions of WM rely on different pools of resources. Studies that addressed this question by examining whether dual-task costs occur in tasks combining processing and storage have led to mixed results. Whereas some of them reported symmetric dual-task costs, others found no or negligible effects, while still others found a reduction in performance in memory but not in processing. In the present experiment, we tested whether these discrepancies in results might be due to participants strategically prioritizing one component of the task over the other. Thus, we asked participants to perform at their maximum level (i.e. span level) in one component of the dual-task and assessed performance on the other. In line with resource-sharing views, results indicated that performing at span on 1 task strongly degraded performance on the other, with symmetric costs. However, important residuals in both processing and storage suggested an unexpected resilience of the cognitive system that any resource-sharing theory must take into account. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Working memory is defined by many as the system that allows us to simultaneously store information over brief time periods while engaging in other information processing activities. In a previous study (Rhodes, Jaroslawska et al. (2019) Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148, 1204-1227.) we found that retention of serially presented letters was disrupted by the introduction of an arithmetic processing task during a 10 second delay period. Importantly, the magnitude of this dual task disruption increased with age from 18 to 81. The demands of each task were adjusted prior to dual task so that age differences did not reflect baseline differences in single task performance. Motivated by these findings, theories of working memory, and additional analyses of processing reaction times from this previous experiment, we report two experiments, using the same tasks and adjustment procedure, attempting to modulate the magnitude of age differences in dual task effects via manipulations focused on time for encoding to-be-remembered material. Providing a delay prior to processing activities, to facilitate switching between the two tasks, did not modulate age differences. Neither did separating the to-be-remembered material temporally, to allow for the creation of more distinct representations. These findings provide two replications of our initial finding and suggest that age differences in working memory dual tasking are not due to limitations in the speed of encoding. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 45(9) of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition (see record 2019-48991-001). In the article, the copyright attribution was incorrectly listed and should have published under the Creative Commons CC-BY license. The correct copyright is "© 2018 The Author(s)." All versions of this article have been corrected.] Theories of working memory often disagree on the relationships between processing and storage, particularly on how heavily they rely on an attention-based limited resource. Some posit separation and specialization of resources resulting in minimal interference to memory when completing an ongoing processing task, while others argue for a greater overlap in the resources involved in concurrent tasks. Here, we present four experiments that investigated the presence or absence of dual-task costs for memory and processing. The experiments were carried in an adversarial collaboration in which researchers from three opposing theories collaboratively designed a set of experiments and provided differential predictions in line with each of their models. Participants performed delayed recall of aurally and visually presented letters and an arithmetic verification task either as single tasks or with the arithmetic verification task between presentation and recall of letter sequences. Single- and dual-task conditions were completed with and without concurrent articulatory suppression. A consistent pattern of dual-task and suppression costs was observed for memory, with smaller or null effects on processing. The observed data did not fit perfectly with any one framework, with each model having partial success in predicting data patterns. Implications for each of the models are discussed, with an aim for future research to investigate whether some combination of the models and their assumptions can provide a more comprehensive interpretation of the pattern of effects observed here and in relevant previous studies associated with each theoretical framework. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).