Reasoning and memory: People make varied use of the information available in working memory

Working memory (WM) is used for storing information in a highly accessible state so that other mental processes, such as reasoning, can use that information. Some WM tasks require that participants not only store information, but also reason about that information to perform optimally on the task. In this study, we used visual WM tasks that had both storage and reasoning components to determine both how ideally people are able to reason about information in WM and if there is a relationship between information storage and reasoning. We developed novel psychological process models of the tasks that allowed us to estimate for each participant both how much information they had in WM and how efficiently they reasoned about that information. Our estimates of information use showed that participants are not all ideal information users or minimal information users, but rather that there are individual differences in the thoroughness of information use in our WM tasks. However, we found that our participants tended to be more ideal than minimal. One implication of this work is that to accurately estimate the amount of information in WM, it is important to also estimate how efficiently that information is used. This new analysis contributes to the theoretical premise that human rationality may be bounded by the complexity of task demands. (PsycINFO Database Record