Interference and information organization in keeping track of continually changing information

The influences of information organization and similarity-based interference on memory for changing information were investigated in the present experiment. Participants performed a keeping-track task in which they had to remember the most recent value for each of several continually changing attributes associated with one or several objects. Recall was poor when participants kept track of the same changing attribute compared with when they kept track of different changing attributes. This pattern was observed whether many attributes were mapped to one object or a single attribute was mapped to many objects. Keeping-track performance also deteriorated as the number of information events intervening between presentation and recall increased. The results are discussed in terms of similarity-based interference. Also discussed is the notion that this dynamic task gives rise to the need to distinguish between memory capacity for static information and memory capacity for dynamically changing information.