Nelson Cowan
Biographic Data
| ID | 1661763 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nelson Cowan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nelson |
| FAMILY NAME | Cowan |
| SIGNATURE | COWAN N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Missouri |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3711-4338 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 73 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 59 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Long-term representational costs of overloading working memory
Can learning too much information at once impair long-term retention of its meaning? Emerging evidence suggests that encoding too many items into working memory (WM) limits subsequent long-term memory (LTM) retrieval of their details and gist. These findings highlight a boundary condition for theories positing relatively automatic gist encoding. But how expansive is this boundary? Experiment 1 shows that it extends to older adults, despite their …
The Ups and Downs of Melodic Interval Appreciation
We know relatively little about psychological reactions to simple musical intervals in isolation, beyond the finding that consonant intervals are perceived as more pleasant than dissonant intervals. Here we present simple intervals of pure tones arranged in an XY format (Experiment 1, N = 69) or an XXXY format (Experiment 2, N = 62), with a maximum range of one octave, for a comparison of reactions to melodic intervals that ascend versus descend …
Object- and feature-based working memory limits for pairs of complex objects and their development during the school years
Working memory structure in young Spanish–English bilingual children
Working memory encompasses the limited incoming information that can be held in mind for cognitive processing. To date, we have little information on the effects of bilingualism on working memory because, absent evidence, working memory tasks cannot be assumed to measure the same constructs across language groups. To garner evidence regarding the measurement equivalence in Spanish and English, we examined second-grade children with typical develo…
Children’s use of semantic elaboration in immediate serial order memory
Children’s ability to use semantic elaboration to memorize novel associations of items greatly improves during the elementary school years. Yet, it is unclear whether this improvement contributes to the development of serial order memory. Here we investigated the role of semantic elaboration in the development of immediate memory for lists of object pictures. If the ability to use elaboration to encode new inter-item associations accounts for som…
Phonological Working Memory and Sentence Production in School-Age Children with Typical Language, Dyslexia, and Comorbid Dyslexia and Developmental Language Disorder
Purpose Little is known about the relationship between sentence production and phonological working memory in school-age children. To fill this gap, we examined how strongly these constructs correlate. We also compared diagnostic groups’ working memory abilities to see if differences co-occurred with qualitative differences in their sentences. Method We conducted Bayesian analyses on data from seven- to nine-year-old children (n = 165 typical lan…
To reduce editor bias and increase diversity and transparency, editors must be motivated: Commentary on Sharpe (2024)
Sharpe (2024) summarized the factors leading to editorial bias, lack of diversity, and lack of transparency and indicated what might improve matters. Here, I argue that the suggestions that were made would be improved if more thought were given to how these changes impact the incentives of editors. I give examples in the areas of control of bias, encouragement of diversity, and increase of transparency, showing what might be done to incentivize e…
Liturgical Gift or Theological Burden? Teenagers and Ecumenical Liturgical Exchange Events
Assumptions about the preferences of teenagers in corporate worship regarding format, style, musical selections, and other experiences abound. Recognizing that teenagers are far from homogenous, we sought to listen deeply to how they process and define their experiences of worship, particularly through the lens of encountering liturgical difference. Our research team spent one week with approximately 35 highly religious, majority-Evangelical teen…
Can synchronised tones facilitate immediate memory for printed lists
In verbal list recall, adding features redundant with the ones to be recalled theoretically could assist recall, by providing additional retrieval cues, or it could impede recall, by draining attention away from the features to be recalled. We examined young adults' immediate memory of lists of printed digits when these lists were sometimes accompanied by synchronised, concurrent tones, one per digit. Unlike most previous irrelevant-sound effects…
Disentangling processing and storage accounts of working memory development in childhood
Branded Worship: Introduction
I do not know if I should feel honored or confused that I was invited to edit this issue of Liturgy. Tongue-in-cheek statement aside, I struggled with the title. “Branded worship” makes it sound as
When a Brand is Tainted: The Ethics of Song Selection in Corporate Worship
Content Warning: While there are no graphic details, this article makes references to musicians and pastors who have been accused of sexual abuse.Our very brief story begins on a typical day in Jac
Tradeoffs between item and order information in short-term memory
Working memory development: A 50-year assessment of research and underlying theories
Unconsciously registered items reduce working memory capacity
Working memory limits severely constrain long-term retention
Immediate recall of serial numbers with or without multiple item repetitions
Immediate recall of lists of items in random serial order has been examined in thousands of studies throughout the history of experimental psychology. In most studies, though, there have been no repetitions of items within a list, or occasionally a single repetition. These stimuli differ from the common uses of item series, which often include multiple repetitions (e.g., identification numbers; orders of people at a restaurant table). To begin to…
Differentiation of Two Working Memory Tasks Normed on a Large U.S. Sample of Children 2–7 Years Old
The Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, 4th ed. includes two measures of working memory normed on children 2;6–7;7. The present analyses of the typically developing children (N = 1,591, 812 female, 779 male, with an ethnic distribution approximating the United States) provide new, theoretically important information about these working memory tasks, Picture Memory and Zoo Locations. These new analyses establish developmental tre…
Phonological vulnerability for school-aged Spanish-English-speaking bilingual children
This study examined accuracy on syllable-final (coda) consonants in newly-learned English-like nonwords to determine whether school-aged bilingual children may be more vulnerable to making errors on English-only codas than their monolingual, English-speaking peers, even at a stage in development when phonological accuracy in productions of familiar words is high. Bilingual Spanish-English-speaking second-graders (age 7–9) with typical development…
The development of metacognitive accuracy in working memory across childhood
Growth in working memory capacity, the number of items kept active in mind, is thought to be an important aspect of childhood cognitive development. Here, we focused on participants' awareness of the contents of their working memory, or meta-working memory, which seems important because people can put cognitive abilities to best use only if they are aware of their limitations. In two experiments on the development of meta-working memory in childr…
Developmental change in the nature of attention allocation in a dual task
Younger children have more difficulty in sharing attention between two concurrent tasks than do older participants, but in addition to this developmental change, we documented changes in the nature of attention sharing. We studied children 6-8 and 10-14 years old and college students (in all, 104 women and 76 men; 3% Hispanic, 3% Black or African American, 3% Asian, 7% multiracial, and 84% White). On each dual-task trial, the participant received…
How Do Scientific Views Change? Notes From an Extended Adversarial Collaboration
There are few examples of an extended adversarial collaboration, in which investigators committed to different theoretical views collaborate to test opposing predictions. Whereas previous adversarial collaborations have produced single research articles, here, we share our experience in programmatic, extended adversarial collaboration involving three laboratories in different countries with different theoretical views regarding working memory, th…
Incidental learning of list membership is affected by serial position in the list
20, 1253-1258] examined incidental memory of whether two words had occurred in the same list or different lists, after the lists had been presented with an orienting task that did not require memorisation. Performance was superior for 3-word lists compared to 6- or 9-word lists, with memory for the longer lists near chance levels. Here we re-examine this phenomenon with methodological modifications to ensure that learning was incidental: we remov…
Working Memory: The State of the Science
Short-term memory based on activated long-term memory: A review in response to Norris (2017)
Short-term memory (STM), the limited information temporarily in a state of heightened accessibility, includes just-presented events and recently retrieved information. Norris (2017) argued for a prominent class of theories in which STM depends on the brain keeping a separate copy of new information, and against alternatives in which the information is held only in a portion of long-term memory (LTM) that is currently activated (aLTM). Here I ques…
Evolving conceptions of memory storage, selective attention, and their mutual constraints within the human information-processing system
Life-span development of visual working memory: When is feature binding difficult
We asked whether the ability to keep in working memory the binding between a visual object and its spatial location changes with development across the life span more than memory for item information. Paired arrays of colored squares were identical or differed in the color of one square, and in the latter case, the changed color was unique on that trial (item change) or was duplicated elsewhere in the array (color-location binding change). Childr…
Processing limits of selective attention and working memory: Potential implications for interpreting
This article summarizes recent research on working memory and attention, with an emphasis on one theoretical framework in which working memory and attention are intricately related (Cowan, 1988, 1995, 1999a). Within this framework, working memory is conceived as an activated portion of long-term memory and, within that activated portion, the focus of attention and control processes that direct it. The focus of attention presumably can link activa…
The phonological and metaphonological representation of speech: Evidence from fluent backward talkers
On short and long auditory stores
A consensus-based transparency checklist
We present a consensus-based checklist to improve and document the transparency of research reports in social and behavioural research. An accompanying online application allows users to complete the form and generate a report that they can submit with their manuscript or post to a public repository
Benchmarks for models of short-term and working memory
Any mature field of research in psychology-such as short-term/working memory-is characterized by a wealth of empirical findings. It is currently unrealistic to expect a theory to explain them all; theorists must satisfice with explaining a subset of findings. The aim of the present article is to make the choice of that subset less arbitrary and idiosyncratic than is current practice. We propose criteria for identifying benchmark findings that eve…
Lay-Prophet-Priest: The Not-So-Fledgling “Office” of the Worship Leader
Instead of being a “worship leader,” I’m the “lead worshiper.” I just get up there and get it started, and then we worship. I lead the transitions from song to song, but I try to stay out of the wa
Task experience and children's working memory performance: A perspective from recall timing
Working memory is an important theoretical construct among children, and measures of its capacity predict a range of cognitive skills and abilities. Data from 9- and 11-year-old children illustrate how a chronometric analysis of recall can complement and elaborate recall accuracy in advancing our understanding of working memory. A reading span task was completed by 130 children, 75 of whom were tested on 2 occasions, with sequence length either i…
Talking backward: Exceptional Speech Play in Late Childhood
The game of 'talking backward', invented independently by two boys aged 8; 10 and 9; 11, is studied with reference to the role of speech play in linguistic, cognitive, and social development. Case reports from 27 adult backward talkers suggest a lower limit of about 7 years for the onset of this ability. The backward speech of the two children illustrates how either phonology or orthography can be used as a basis for backward speech, and demonstr…
The development of metacognitive accuracy in working memory across childhood
Growth in working memory capacity, the number of items kept active in mind, is thought to be an important aspect of childhood cognitive development. Here, we focused on participants' awareness of the contents of their working memory, or meta-working memory, which seems important because people can put cognitive abilities to best use only if they are aware of their limitations. In two experiments on the development of meta-working memory in childr…
Developmental change in the nature of attention allocation in a dual task
Younger children have more difficulty in sharing attention between two concurrent tasks than do older participants, but in addition to this developmental change, we documented changes in the nature of attention sharing. We studied children 6-8 and 10-14 years old and college students (in all, 104 women and 76 men; 3% Hispanic, 3% Black or African American, 3% Asian, 7% multiracial, and 84% White). On each dual-task trial, the participant received…
Electrophysiological evidence of developmental changes in the duration of auditory sensory memory
In behavioral studies, children's memory for tonal frequency has been found to persist for less time than adults' (T. A. Keller & N. Cowan, 1994). The present study was done to evaluate the argument that this effect is due to changes in auditory sensory memory and not to attentional mechanisms. This question was investigated using mismatch negativity (MMN), an auditory event-related potential considered to be insensitive to attention. Participant…
Developmental increase in the duration of memory for tone pitch
This research examined developmental change in the duration of memory for tome pitch. In Experiment 1, the persistence of memory for pitch was examined with a 2-tone comparison task in children 6-7 and 10-12 years old and in adults. Because pitch perception differences could contaminate the measure of memory, the frequency difference between tones was adjusted for each subject until a criterion level of performance was reached. In a subsequent te…
Talking backward: Exceptional Speech Play in Late Childhood
The game of 'talking backward', invented independently by two boys aged 8; 10 and 9; 11, is studied with reference to the role of speech play in linguistic, cognitive, and social development. Case reports from 27 adult backward talkers suggest a lower limit of about 7 years for the onset of this ability. The backward speech of the two children illustrates how either phonology or orthography can be used as a basis for backward speech, and demonstr…
On short and long auditory stores
The phonological and metaphonological representation of speech: Evidence from fluent backward talkers
The developmental course of two children who could talk backward five years ago
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Evolving conceptions of memory storage, selective attention, and their mutual constraints within the human information-processing system
Acquisition of Pig Latin: A case study
A boy's acquisition of Pig Latin was monitored throughout the year preceding first grade. Abilities underlying this game include the identification of words, deletion of the first syllabic onset (i.e. prevocalic consonants) of each word, blending of this onset and the suffix [e1] onto the word's end, and short-term memory for speech units. Performance improved over time as the underlying abilities developed. Meanwhile, various informative errors …
Developmental increase in the duration of memory for tone pitch
This research examined developmental change in the duration of memory for tome pitch. In Experiment 1, the persistence of memory for pitch was examined with a 2-tone comparison task in children 6-7 and 10-12 years old and in adults. Because pitch perception differences could contaminate the measure of memory, the frequency difference between tones was adjusted for each subject until a criterion level of performance was reached. In a subsequent te…
Mechanisms of Verbal Short-Term Memory
problem it poses for traditional chaining theory, in Quantitative Analyses of Behavior: Discrimination Processes, M.L. Commons, R.J. Herrnstein, and A.R. Wagner, Eds. (Ballinger, Cambridge, MA, 1984). 10. H.S. Terrace, Chunking during serial learn ing by a pigeon: I. Basic evidence, journal of Exper imental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 17, 81-93 (1991); M.R. D'Amato and M. Colombo, Representation of serial order in monkeys {Cebus apella…
Can We Resolve Contradictions between Process Dissociation Models
Constraints on Awareness, Attention, Processing, and Memory: Some Recent Investigations with Ignored Speech
An Embedded-Processes Model of Working Memory
FIVE CENTRAL FEATURES OF THE APPROACH The embedded-processes model of working memory relies upon the following five principles, which emphasize links between memory and attention. (1) Working memory information comes from hierarchically arranged faculties comprising: (a) long-term memory, (b) the subset of longterm memory that is currently activated, and (c) the subset of activated memory that is in the focus of attention and awareness. (2) Diffe…
Electrophysiological evidence of developmental changes in the duration of auditory sensory memory
In behavioral studies, children's memory for tonal frequency has been found to persist for less time than adults' (T. A. Keller & N. Cowan, 1994). The present study was done to evaluate the argument that this effect is due to changes in auditory sensory memory and not to attentional mechanisms. This question was investigated using mismatch negativity (MMN), an auditory event-related potential considered to be insensitive to attention. Participant…
Processing limits of selective attention and working memory: Potential implications for interpreting
This article summarizes recent research on working memory and attention, with an emphasis on one theoretical framework in which working memory and attention are intricately related (Cowan, 1988, 1995, 1999a). Within this framework, working memory is conceived as an activated portion of long-term memory and, within that activated portion, the focus of attention and control processes that direct it. The focus of attention presumably can link activa…
The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity
Miller (1956) summarized evidence that people can remember about seven chunks in short-term memory (STM) tasks. However, that number was meant more as a rough estimate and a rhetorical device than as a real capacity limit. Others have since suggested that there is a more precise capacity limit, but that it is only three to five chunks. The present target article brings together a wide variety of data on capacity limits suggesting that the smaller…
A latent variable analysis of working memory capacity, short-term memory capacity, processing speed, and general fluid intelligence
On the capacity of attention: Its estimation and its role in working memory and cognitive aptitudes
Working Memory Capacity (Essays in Cognitive Psychology)
The idea of one's memory "filling up" is a humorous misconception of how memory in general is thought to work; it actually has no capacity limit. However, the idea of a "full brain" makes more sense with reference to working memory, which is the limited amount of information a person can hold temporarily in an especially accessible form for use in the completion of almost any challenging cognitive task." "This book explains the evidence supportin…
Life-span development of visual working memory: When is feature binding difficult
We asked whether the ability to keep in working memory the binding between a visual object and its spatial location changes with development across the life span more than memory for item information. Paired arrays of colored squares were identical or differed in the color of one square, and in the latter case, the changed color was unique on that trial (item change) or was duplicated elsewhere in the array (color-location binding change). Childr…
Chapter 20 What are the differences between long-term, short-term, and working memory?
Task experience and children's working memory performance: A perspective from recall timing
Working memory is an important theoretical construct among children, and measures of its capacity predict a range of cognitive skills and abilities. Data from 9- and 11-year-old children illustrate how a chronometric analysis of recall can complement and elaborate recall accuracy in advancing our understanding of working memory. A reading span task was completed by 130 children, 75 of whom were tested on 2 occasions, with sequence length either i…
The Magical Mystery Four: How Is Working Memory Capacity Limited, and Why?
Working memory storage capacity is important because cognitive tasks can be completed only with sufficient ability to hold information as it is processed. The ability to repeat information depends on task demands but can be distinguished from a more constant, underlying mechanism: a central memory store limited to 3 to 5 meaningful items for young adults. I discuss why this central limit is important, how it can be observed, how it differs among …
Working Memory Capacity
The idea of one's memory "filling up" is a humorous misconception of how memory in general is thought to work; it is actually has no capacity limit. However, the idea of a "full brain" makes more sense with reference to working memory, which is the limited amount of information a person can hold temporarily in an especially accessible form for use in the completion of almost any challenging cognitive task. This groundbreaking book explains the ev…
With development, list recall includes more chunks, not just larger ones
The nature of the childhood development of immediate recall has been difficult to determine. There could be a developmental increase in either the number of chunks held in working memory or the use of grouping to make the most of a constant capacity. In 3 experiments with children in the early elementary school years and adults, we show that improvements in the immediate recall of word and picture lists come partly from increases in the number of…
Working Memory Underpins Cognitive Development, Learning, and Education
Short Term Memories, Theories of
Psychology (46 works) · Cognitive psychology (39 works) · Cognition (30 works) · Computer Science (27 works) · Working memory (27 works) · Neuroscience (24 works) · Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies (22 works) · Developmental psychology (17 works) · Cognitive science (16 works) · Short-term memory (16 works)