A CREATIVE COGNITION 233As just mentioned, individual diff erences in working memory— and
intelligence— are said to stem from diff erences in its capacity. Attempts to
mea sure that capacity duly consist of tasks that require holding some-
thing “in mind” while attending to a concurrent task. Especially popu lar
are so- called n- back tests. Participants are presented with a string of items
(e.g., letters or digits) on a computer screen. Th ey have to decide whether
each stimulus matches the one that appeared n items ago (where n may be,
e.g., 2, or 3, or 4, as dictated by the investigator).
How is this model said to work? Well, through our old friend the
“executive system.” Baddeley himself used the meta phor of a com pany
boss to describe it.^28 Th e com pany boss decides which matters deserve
attention and which can be ignored. Th e boss then gathers information
together from other departments, to integrate and clarify the prob lems,
and then selects strategies for dealing with them. Th ese departments
recruit two “slave systems,” a verbal store and a “visuo- spatial scratchpad”
that deliver information in the required format.
Huge amounts of research and mountains of texts have been done and
written on working memory, especially as a source of cognitive potential.
And the models are at least logical interpretations of the data gathered.
But they bear little resemblance to how a dynamic cognitive system
operates. As we have seen, there is no evidence of an executive system in
the brain. Instead, cognitive functions are emergent properties of a self-
organ izing attractor landscape. Likewise, no evidence exists for a coher-
ent “store,” as a discrete place varying in capacity or some other easily
quantifi ed dimension. And, there are no repre sen ta tions in sensory areas
in the form of coherent symbols or tokens: certainly none that gain entry
into working memory, in the sense of parcels in a letter box.
Investigators oft en acknowledge, indeed, the prob lems of interpreta-
tion in the area. As Susanne Jaeggi and colleagues say about the n- back
test, “ Little knowledge is available about the cognitive pro cesses that
mediate per for mance in this task and consequentially, about the pro cesses
under lying n- back training.”^29
In other words, it seems that individual diff erences in cognitive
ability are being ascribed to variables that do not actually exist in real-
ity. It is perhaps hardly surprising that the group set up by the American
Psychological Association to investigate intelligence concluded that the
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