WoMAAC: Working Memory Across the Adult Lifespan: Adversarial Collaboration.

Description

WOMAAC is a four-year project that adopted the approach of “adversarial collaboration” (scientists who disagree working together) to test three different theoretical frameworks for working memory: multiple components, embedded processes, and time-based resource sharing. We addressed a common set of research questions, with parallel replications across labs. The focus was on the understanding of how participants perform when asked to hold items in memory while performing some other task compared with performing each task on
its own, and how this ability changes across adult aging. This talk will
describe the experience of undertaking this kind of project which has
now formally ended and will present key experiments and outcomes. In
sum, across multiple experiments, no one theory accounted for all of the
data, requiring a change in theoretical assumptions, and an exploration
of participant strategies demonstrated that participants often changed
the way they performed each task under single and dual task conditions.
Adversarial collaboration is proposed as an approach to resolving debates
that self-perpetuate indefinitely.

Period	20 Nov 2020
Held at	Psychonomic Society
Degree of Recognition	International