Estimating the executive demands of a one-back choice reaction time task by means of the selective interference paradigm

Abstract

The present study proposes a new executive task, the one-back choice reaction time (RT) task, and implements the selective interference paradigm to estimate the executive demands of the processing components involved in this task. Based on the similarities between a one-back choice RT task and the n-back updating task, it was hypothesized that one-back delaying of a choice reaction involves executive control. In three experiments, framed within Baddeley's (1986) working-memory model, a one-back choice RT task, a choice RT task, articulatory suppression, and matrix tapping were performed concurrently with primary tasks involving verbal, visuospatial, and executive processing. The results demonstrate that one-back delaying of a choice reaction interferes with tasks requiring executive control, while the potential interference at the level of the verbal or visuospatial working memory slave systems remains minimal.

This research was made possible by Grant No. 011D5601 of the Special Research Fund at Ghent University to the first author and Grant No. 0114799 of the Special Research Fund at Ghent University to the second author. The authors are indebted to Robert Logie, Karl Christoph Klauer, Baptist Liefooghe, and Frederick Verbruggen for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Notes

¹ Baddeley (2000) recently proposed a fourth component to the WM model, called the episodic buffer, which is held responsible for integrating information from working memory and long-term memory. We did not involve the episodic buffer in the present study because the operationalizations of this theoretical concept are not well established yet.

² In fact, not only the n-back task, but also the running-memory task involves n-back updating.