Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The classic Baddeley and Hitch (1974) model divides working memory into domain-specific subsystems and a shared, do- main-general central executive, which plays a role in allocating resources to items stored in the subsystems. The nature of this resource—in particular, its quantization (discrete vs. continu- ous) and the flexibility of its allocation—has been studied ex- tensively in the visual domain, with evidence from experiments using continuous response measures providing support for models with flexibly and continuously divisible resources. It remains unclear, however, whether similar mechanisms medi- ate the division of resources in phonological working memory. In this paper, we show that, despite representational differences between visual and auditory processing, continuous measures can also be employed for studying phonological working memory. Using such measures, we demonstrate that the prin- ciples of resource division in visual and phonological pro- cessing are indeed similar, providing evidence for a domain- general mechanism for allocating working memory resources.