ABSTRACT
The first question that can be asked is “Why address the concept of working memory in a book whose general topic is that of control?” As will be apparent throughout this book, the concept of control can be used very differently. One of these uses, in cognitive psychology, consists in speaking of “controlled processes.” It would lead us too far to discuss in detail the concept of controlled processes in this chapter, all the more as a whole section of this book is devoted to this issue; it suffices to say that they have often been considered to be synonymous with conscious, or attentional, or effortful processes, while being opposed to automatic processes.2The common characteristic of all these quasisynonyms is that they involve limited resources. This is also the main defining property of working memory (WM). Indeed, although WM is defined differently in different models, there is a general consensus that it is a system with very limited resources, for temporarily maintaining and processing information for use in other cognitive tasks. Thus, the essential characteristic of WM is not so much its memory (or storage) component, but the fact that it consists in temporarily holding information on line, while being severely limited; much work has been devoted to examining the limits of these resources (working memory capacity), particularly among developmentalists.
