Testing hypotheses about working memory capacity.

Abstract

When an individual is engaged in sampling from a finite population, an assessment of their working memory for previously sampled objects is often desired. An extension of the classical occupancy distribution provides a framework for testing hypotheses about working memory capacity, based on a general model of working memory in which the individual retains a record of m previous inspections (and hence does not make the mistake of resampling these objects) and samples with replacement objects outside the current memory set. The buffer size m provides a common metric for assessing the effect of variables on performance in search tasks involving different numbers of items, or locations.