ABSTRACT
In life, memory and thinking are inextricably intertwined. When tackling a problem, previously acquired concepts must be retrieved from longterm memory to represent the problem situation, previously acquired rules in long-term memory need to be activated to change the problem representation towards the goal state, intermediate results may need to be held briefly in working memory, and the results of thought may in turn change long-term memory contents. The present chapter will be focusing particularly on the interrelations between working memory and that form of thinking referred to as reasoning. The role of working memory in reasoning was a concern of the originating papers of the Baddeley-Hitch working-memory model (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974; Hitch & Baddeley, 1976) and this concern continues. In common with many of the chapters in this book, I will be discussing the issues within the framework of the Baddeley-Hitch model of working memory as a tripartite system consisting of central executive, phonological (or articulatory) loop, and visuo-spatial scratchpad (or sketch-pad). In the remainder of this section I will consider various questions of definition that gather around the notion of “reasoning” and its associate “rationality”, then, in the second section, I will outline salient empirical results, and in the last section, I will develop a theoretical discussion of how working memory and strategies for reasoning tasks could interact.
