Poster: Working memory capacity and attentional networks: relationships between processing, storage and executive control components.

MUSSO, M.; RICHARD'S, MARÍA M; CASCALLAR, E.

Amsterdam

Congreso; 15th European Congress of Psychology; 2017

European Federation of Psychologists? Association (EFPA)

Working memorycapacity (WMC) has been shown to be a critical cognitive system which ininteraction with attentional mechanisms participates in the production of complexhigher order processes. This study aims to present normative dataof WMC and attentional networks (AN) and to understand the relationshipsbetween processing/time (PT), storage/recall (SR) and executive attention (EA)components of this cognitive system. Method: 1218 university students (Female:56.6%), (Mean of age=20.18; SD=3.129), enrolled in their first academicyear. Instruments: Automated Operation Span to measure WMC and AttentionalNetworks Test to evaluate: alerting (AN), orienting (ON) and EA. An 85% ofarithmetic accuracy criterion was used to control the interference in the spantest.  Descriptive statistics, storagescores, errors, reaction times and AN measures as a function of the percentilein the dataset will be presented. Gender effects on the recall measure of WMC,AN, ON and EA were found (p<.05). Males outperformed females on these measuresbut the effects size were small. Secondary school background effects were foundon recall: students coming from private religious schools outperformed publicschool students (p<.05; η²=.009). A three-factor model achieved a very goodfit (χ2=24.838; χ2/gl=4.14; p=.001; NFI=.990; CFI=.992;RMSEA= .047). PT and SR were negatively related; EA was negatively correlatedwith SR; EA was positively related with PT, consistent with previous studies.