Psychologists Defend The Importance Of Working Memory Capacity

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In a new paper in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, psychologists David Z. Hambrick of Michigan State University and Elizabeth J. Meinz of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville disagree strongly. “We don’t deny the importance of the knowledge and skill that accrue through practice,” says Hambrick. “ But, we think that for certain types of tasks, basic abilities and capacities—ones that are general, stable across time, and substantially heritable—play an important role in skilled performance. “ Such basic capacities are a component of talent, Hambrick and Meinz believe.

The authors’ work involves a particular basic measure of cognitive ability: working memory capacity, the ability to store and process information at the same time, which correlates with success in many cognitive tasks, from abstract reasoning to language learning.

Challenging another “experts-are-made” contention—that beyond a certain threshold, intelligence makes less and less of a difference in accomplishment—the authors cite a study by Vanderbilt University researchers that looked at the math SAT scores of people with PhDs in science, technology, engineering, or math. Those who scored in the 99.9th percentile at age 13 were 18 times more likely to go on to earn a PhD than those who scored better than only 99.1 percent of their teenage peers. “Even at the highest end, the higher the intellectual ability—and by extension, the higher the working memory capacity—the better,” says Hambrick.

“Some would consider this bad news. We’d all like to think that basic capacities and abilities are irrelevant—it’s the egalitarian view of expertise,” Hambrick says. “We’re not saying that limitations can’t be overcome.” Still, no matter how hard you work, it may be what you’re born with or develop very early in life that “distinguishes the best from the rest.”