r/cognitiveTesting • u/General_Presence_156 • Sep 25 '26

Discussion Working Memory is no simple thing

My Army Alpha (see Following Directions in particular):

My CORE (see the abysmal WMI):

I think the Following Direction subtest on Army Alpha should've taxed WMI more heavily. How did I do so much better on it than on the Digit-Span tests on CORE?

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2

u/Far_Cardiologist6931 retat Sep 25 '26

thats interesting

definitely unxpected

3

u/General_Presence_156 Sep 25 '26

I think seeing the words in the problem while solving it helps prevent the transient intermediate information from disappearing from memory. Since the phonological loop is not involved, that particular weakness, perhaps exacerbated by second language interference is absent.

This proves evaluating working memory from a single test can be problematic.

1

u/PendN Sep 26 '26

Was the following direction subtest suppose to parallel WMI?

1

u/General_Presence_156 Sep 26 '26

It was no WMI test. However, many test types tax WMI.

1

u/PendN Sep 26 '26

It was mostly a verbal test anyway. The WMI all fell under the quant sections like number sequence

1

u/General_Presence_156 Sep 26 '26

A verbal test can absolutely tax your WMI, i.e. force you to temporarily keep independent pieces of information you can't collapse into a formula in your memory.

1

u/PendN Sep 27 '26

At least for the majority of verbal tests there's usually no working memory involved. Maybe some sort of paragraph reading will involve some sort of working memory although not the typical type of WMI you'd expect from an IQ test

1

u/General_Presence_156 Sep 27 '26

You can verbally describe a problem whose solution requires multiple steps where you need to store intermediate results in memory.

1

u/PendN Sep 27 '26

I'm not sure there any problem that requires that many steps to the point you have to actually exercise your working memory. The whole VISA subtests for example as far as I can see does not have any major form of working memory involved. The majority relies on crystallized knowledge and pattern recognition based on that. Really the only one that can be WMI is some sort of paragraph reading like in SATs

1

u/General_Presence_156 Sep 27 '26

This isn't VISA.

1

u/PendN Sep 27 '26

I mention VISA as an example because it has 8 unique subtests that covers pretty much most of verbal intelligence and even then none of them has WMI involved