Examining the influence of working memory on updating mental models

The ability to accurately build and update mental representations of our environment depends on our ability to integrate information over a variety of time scales and detect changes in the regularity of events. As such, the cognitive mechanisms that support model building and updating are likely to interact with those involved in working memory (WM). To examine this, we performed three experiments that manipulated WM demands concurrently with the need to attend to regularities in other stimulus properties (i.e., location and shape). That is, participants completed a prediction task while simultaneously performing an n-back WM task with either no load or a moderate load. The distribution of target locations (Experiment 1) or shapes (Experiments 2 and 3) included some level of probabilistic regularity, which, unbeknown to participants, changed abruptly within each block. Moderate WM load hampered the ability to benefit from target regularities and to adapt to changes in those regularities (i.e., the prediction task). This was most pronounced when both prediction and WM requirements shared the same target feature. Our results show that representational updating depends on free WM resources in a domain-specific fashion.