A Working Memory Test Battery: Java-Based Collection of Seven Working Memory Tasks

Introduction Klatzky (1980) described the working memory system as being a mental workbench using the analogy of a carpenters workbench. As a carpenter will lay out the tools and materials that they need for the job on their workbench so they are readily available, our mental workbench can hold ‘chunks’ of information that are required for our current cognitive goals. This workspace has limited capacity and the critical factors that contribute to this capacity ‘limit’ are open to debate but it is clear that the working memory system is a limited resource and that this limit varies across individuals. Working memory ability has been shown to correlate reliably with other cognitive abilities such as; fluid intelligence (Conway, Cowan, Bunting, Therriault, & Minkoff, 2002), arithmetic (McLean & Hitch, 1999), the ability to prevent mind wandering during tasks requiring focus (Kane et al., 2007), executive attention (Kane & Engle, 2003), general learning disabilities (Alloway, 2009), and many more. In addition to its prominence within cognitive research there are a wide variety of other disciplines incorporating WM ability in to their research programmes and assessing the impact of this cognitive system on their respective domains of study. Some examples of topics that have seen measures of WM used as a predictor include depression (Arnett et al., 1999), learning computer languages (Shute, 1991), life event stress (Klein & Boals, 2001), regulating emotion (Kleider, Parrott, & King, 2010), and multitasking (Bühner, König, Pick, & Krumm, 2006; Hambrick, Oswald, Darowski, Rench, & Brou, 2010).