Beyond Working Memory Capacity: Attention Control as the Underlying Mechanism of Cognitive Abilities

Working memory capacity (WMC) has long been used as a central measure of cognitive abilities, predicting performance across a wide range of tasks. We argue that much of this predictive power in fact reflects attention control (AC)—functions such as goal mainte-nance and inhibition—rather than storage capacity per se. We review evidence across six domains: (1) perception and sensory discrimination, (2) learning and problem solving, (3) cognitive control and decision making, (4) retrieval and memory performance, (5) mul-titasking and real-world performance, and (6) clinical applications. We show that many findings attributed to WMC are better explained as reflecting demands on AC. We en-courage the use of more reliable measures of AC to directly test these mechanisms and recommend latent-variable approaches to better distinguish the cognitive processes underlying complex performance.