The Mental Representation of Goals Buchkatalog

Working memory acts as the central executive officer of cognition. It drives human action by coordinating perception, memory, and motor processes with a prioritized set of instructions as events unfold over time. There is still much to explore on the nature of working memory. These studies shed light on one important piece of working memory that has been infrequently explored, the importance of goals and how they are represented in working memory. Four experiments manipulated timing conditions, memory loads, and extraneous events in an event counting paradigm to reveal that greater time to process information also leads to over-rehearsal, distraction, and a tendency to make more errors. These results imply a redefinition of working memory's central executive function from more traditional accounts. The results also drive compelling conclusions addressing storage, linking, and triggering of goal representations. Number representation, error detection, and cognitive modeling are explored.