Abstract:

Existing studies disagree as to whether the respective correlation of working memory as a whole and its two sub-systems—short term memory and central executive—with general intelligence is strong or weak. Working memory and general intelligence are two independent constructs that have strong relationship to each other, with the former able to predict the latter. The reasons of such strong relationship between WM and general intelligence are principally that working memory and general intelligence share prefrontal cortex, controlled attention and complex strategic processes underlie performance on working memory span tasks as well as tests of general intelligence, while the overlapping of test content and the compound prediction of latent variable may exaggerate their correlation.

Key words: general intelligence, working memory, short-term memory, central executive, controlled attention