Psychology Department Colloquium

Psychology Bldg. Rm. 101; 3:00pm

Randall Engle

http://psychology.gatech.edu/renglelab/

Title: Working memory capacity as a mediating variable

Abstract: The early work on working memory capacity was primarily concerned with situations in which individual differences in working memory capacity were important to real-world cognitive tasks. Clearly, cognitive control plays a large role in why those differences are important.  There is good evidence that these differences result from particular brain systems associated with particular neurotransmitters and that particular single-nucleotide polymorphisms are involved.  It has also become clear that we need to think about working memory capacity not just as a TRAIT variable but also as a STATE variable much in the same way we think of state and trait anxiety.  I will discuss evidence for this idea and the idea that we need to think about measures of working memory capacity as reflecting a mediating or intervening variable which increases the generality of the concept enormously.

Randall W. Engle, Editor
Current Directions in Psychological Science
School of Psychology
Georgia Institute of Technology
654 Cherry Street
Atlanta, GA 30332


If you would like to meet with Dr. Engle, please contact Louis Matzel at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.