Attention and working memory capacity: insights from blocking, highlighting, and knowledge restructuring

The concept of attention is central to theorizing in learning as well as in working memory. However, research to date has yet to establish how attention as construed in one domain maps onto the other. We investigate two manifestations of attention in category- and cue-learning to examine whether they might provide common ground between learning and working memory. Experiment 1 examined blocking and highlighting effects in an associative learning paradigm, which are widely thought to be attentionally mediated. No relationship between attentional performance indicators and working memory capacity (WMC) was observed, despite the fact that WMC was strongly associated with overall learning performance. Experiment 2 used a knowledge restructuring paradigm, which is known to require recoordination of partial category knowledge using representational attention. We found that the extent to which people successfully recoordinated their knowledge was related to WMC. The results illustrate a link between WMC and representational-but not dimensional-attention in category learning.