Working Memory Capacity in Hot and Cold Cognition

Much has been said about the relationship between measures of Work­ ing Memory Capacity (WMC) and higher order cognition. Indeed, what exactly accounts for this relationship has been a major topic of inquiry in cognitive psychology for over 20 years (Engle & Oransky, 1999). Attempts to better understand this problem have shed considerable light on the role of WMC in a wide array of research domains. Specifically, research has shown that measures of WMC are related to complex learning (Kyllonen & Stephens, 1990), following directions (Engle, Carullo, & Collins, 1991), rea­ soning ability (Engle, Tuholski, Laughlin, & Conway, 1999; Kyllonen & Christal, 1990), and vocabulary learning (Daneman & Green, 1986). Addi­ tionally, not only has WMC been implicated in higher order cognition indeed, these correlations point to the utility of such a concept in the first placebut also now WMC is being implicated in other research domains. Working memory measures not only predict reading comprehension scores (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980), performance on standard achievement tests (i.e., SAT: Engle et al., 1999), and reasoning, but also seem to predict early onset Alzheimer's (Rosen, Bergeson, Putnam, Harwell, & Sunderland, 2002), the effects of alcohol consumption (Finn, 2002), and one's ability to deal with life-event stress (Klein & Boals, 2001). Thus, the utility of WMC is not merely limited to performance on high-level cognitive tasks, but is also important in a variety of situations that impact people on a day-to-day basis. Working Memory Capacity is important in situations requiring both rational or cold cognition such as selective attention and reasoning (Engle et al., 1999; Kane & Engle, 2003) and is also important under conditions of emotional or hot cognition, such as stress and depression (Arnett et al., 1999; Klein & Boals, 2001). The present chapter will focus on the WMC's role in these situations in terms of our view that the basis for WMC is the ability to control attention.