Identifying Elements of Executive Attention
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The following is an abstract submitted for the Psychonomic Society 45th Annual Meeting, describing work conducted for my 2002-2003 Senior Thesis.
Several theories propose that cognitive performance is mediated by a unitary control mechanism (e.g., executive attention, guided activation, central executive) that is indexed by working memory (WM) span tasks. To evaluate these theories, it is necessary to (1) illustrate an association between the putative unitary mechanism and a number of established executive control processes and, (2) present evidence for the direction of causality: is this mechanism truly a unitary cognitive primitive, or rather a composite of more basic elements of executive control? Our individual differences study addressed (1) and provides a framework for investigating (2): we observed moderate-to-large correlations between WM span and measures of executive control function (e.g., mediation of interference and attention shifting); and a combination of measures of executive control and short-term memory span accounted for 55% of variance in WM span. Regarding (2), tetrad analyses offer a means of assessing causal models of executive control.