Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Individual differences in working memory are an important source of information for refining theories of memory and cognition. Computational modeling is an effective tool for studying individual differences because it allows researchers to maintain the basic structure of a theory while perturbing a particular component. This paper presents a computational model for a digit working memory task and demonstrates that varying a single parameter captures individual differences in that task. The model is developed within the framework of the ACT-R theory (Anderson, 1993), and the continuous parameter manipulated represents attentional capacity for the current goal.