Working Memory Capacity and the Antisaccade Task: Individual Differences in Voluntary Saccade Control.

Engle, Randall W.; Unsworth, Nash; Schrock, Josef C. · 2004 · OpenAlex

DOI: 10.1037/0278-7393.30.6.1302

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Summary

This study investigates the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and voluntary saccade control, specifically addressing whether individual differences in WMC reflect distinct capabilities in inhibiting prepotent responses and directing attention. Previous research suggested that WMC differences might be confounded by secondary task demands in antisaccade paradigms. To isolate the role of executive attention, the authors conducted three experiments using a pure eye-movement task, eliminating concurrent cognitive loads such as letter identification. The central hypothesis was that high-WMC individuals would outperform low-WMC individuals on antisaccade trials, which require suppressing a reflexive look toward a cue and generating a voluntary saccade in the opposite direction, but not on prosaccade trials, which rely on automatic orienting. The researchers screened 60 participants using the Operation Span (OSPAN) task, categorizing them into high- and low-span groups based on quartile performance. Participants performed prosaccade and antisaccade trials where they had to shift their gaze toward or away from a flashing cue, respectively. Experiment 1 presented trials in blocked conditions, while Experiments 2 and 3 introduced mixed blocks and varied cueing conditions to increase cognitive control demands. Eye movements were recorded using an infrared eye-tracker, with data analyzed for latency and direction errors. The design allowed for the examination of both the suppression of reflexive responses and the generation of volitional eye movements without the interference of secondary memory tasks. The results demonstrated significant individual differences in antisaccade performance but not in prosaccade performance. High-WMC participants exhibited faster latencies and fewer direction errors on antisaccade trials compared to low-WMC participants. Specifically, low-span individuals made significantly more reflexive errors, looking toward the cue rather than away from it, and showed slower reaction times on correct antisaccade trials, indicating difficulty resolving conflict between the task goal and habitual response tendencies. In contrast, both groups performed similarly on prosaccade trials, with high accuracy and comparable latencies, confirming that the automatic orienting response did not differentiate WMC groups. These findings held across different experimental conditions, including those with increased interference. The study concludes that individual differences in working memory capacity are not solely due to storage limitations but reflect a domain-general executive attention ability crucial for controlling focus and inhibiting prepotent responses. The antisaccade task serves as a valid measure of this executive control, independent of secondary task loads. These results support the view that WMC is fundamentally linked to the ability to maintain task goals in active memory and override automatic impulses, providing insight into the mechanisms underlying higher-order cognitive functions and attentional control.

Key finding

Individuals with lower working memory capacity make more errors and take longer to execute correct voluntary saccades in the antisaccade task compared to high-capacity individuals, demonstrating that working memory differences reflect variations in executive attention and response inhibition.

Methodology

lab_experiment

Sample size: 60

Provenance

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Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.

Topics

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• executive function