Page "Working memory" Paragraph 18

Others have argued that the capacity of working memory is better characterized as the ability to mentally form relations between elements, or to grasp relations in given information.

This idea has been advanced, among others, by Graeme Halford, who illustrated it by our limited ability to understand statistical interactions between variables.

These authors asked people to compare written statements about the relations between several variables to graphs illustrating the same or a different relation, as in the following sentence: " If the cake is from France, then it has more sugar if it is made with chocolate than if it is made with cream, but if the cake is from Italy, then it has more sugar if it is made with cream than if it is made of chocolate.

" This statement describes a relation between three variables ( country, ingredient, and amount of sugar ), which is the maximum most individuals can understand.

The capacity limit apparent here is obviously not a memory limit ( all relevant information can be seen continuously ) but a limit on how many relationships are discerned simultaneously.