Working Memory Capacity and the Antisaccade Task: A Microanalytic–Macroanalytic Investigation of Individual Differences in Goal Activation and Maintenance

The association between working memory capacity (WMC) and the antisaccade task, which requires subjects to move their eyes and attention away from a strong visual cue, supports the claim that WMCis partially an attentional construct (Kane, Bleckley, Conway, & Engle, 2001; Unsworth, Schrock, &Engle, 2004). Specifically, the WMC-antisaccade relation suggests that WMC helps maintain andexecute task goals despite interference from habitual actions. Related work has recently shown that mindwandering (McVay & Kane, 2009, 2012a, 2012b) and reaction time (RT) variability (Unsworth, 2015)are also related to WMC and they partially explain WMC’s prediction of cognitive abilities. Here, wetested whether mind-wandering propensity and intraindividual RT variation account for WMC’s associations with 2 antisaccade-cued choice RT tasks. In addition, we asked whether any influences of WMC,mind wandering, or intraindividual RT variation on antisaccade are moderated by (a) the temporal gapbetween fixation and the flashing location cue, and (b) whether targets switch sides on consecutive trials.Our quasi-experimental study reexamined a published dataset (Kane et al., 2016) comprising 472 subjectswho completed 6 WMC tasks, 5 attentional tasks with mind-wandering probes, 5 tasks from which wemeasured intraindividual RT variation, and 2 antisaccade tasks with varying fixation-cue gap durations.The WMC-antisaccade association was not accounted for by mind wandering or intraindividual RTvariation. WMC’s effects on antisaccade performance were greater with longer fixation-to-cue intervals,suggesting that goal activation processes—beyond the ability to control mind wandering and RTvariability—are partially responsible for the WMC-antisaccade relation.