WORKING-MEMORY AND WORK WITH MEMORY - VIS UOSPATIAL AND FURTHER COMPONENTS OF PROCESSING

Empirical and theoretical evidence for the concept of working memory i s considered. We argue that the major weakness of this concept is its loose connection with the knowledge about background perceptive and co gnitive processes. Results of two relevant experiments are provided. T he first study demonstrated the classical chunking effect in a speeded visual search and comparison task, the proper domain of a large-capac ity, very short term sensory store. Our second study was a kind of ext ended levels-of-processing experiment. We attempted to manipulate visu al, phonological, and (different) executive components of long-term me mory in the hope of finding some systematic relationships between thes e forms of processing. Indeed, the results demonstrated a high degree of systematicity without any apparent need for a concept such as worki ng memory for the explanation. Accordingly, the place for working memo ry is at all the interfaces where our metacognitive strategies interfe re with mostly domain-specific cognitive mechanisms. Working memory is simply our work with memory.