Human working memory capacity is 7+/-2 in a radial maze with distracting interruption: possible implication for neural mechanisms of declarative and implicit long-term memory.
Human participants were instructed to walk out along each of the arms of a 15-m in diameter, 8-arm radial maze once and only once. In order to approximate the circumstances under which laboratory rats remember visited sites, our human participants were asked to select arms in an unsystematic order. They scored an average of 7.6 to 7.8 correct choices, even if midway during a trial there was a 5-min interruption filled with a verbal-spatial interfering task (a scavenger hunt) or a 15-min interruption filled with a visuospatial task (a maze-running computer simulation). This finding extends our earlier research with humans in 13- or 17-arm radial mazes under nondelay conditions, in which we also found working memory (WM) capacity for about 7 to 9 places, the same as that of laboratory rats. We discuss earlier findings in other laboratories, showing that rats can successfully bridge long radial maze task interruptions of 5 or 8 h, and we compare our results also to those from studies in which human participants were not discouraged from reducing memory load by responding systematically in radial mazes. Because the radial maze task takes minutes to complete even under nondelay conditions its routine consideration as a working memory task in the animal literature alters the assumptions often made about the duration of WM in the human literature. Accumulating empirical findings about place-memory in humans, nonhuman mammals, and birds suggest it might be productive to reevaluate this theoretical issue with respect to present knowledge about the roles of the hippocampus and other brain structures in declarative memory and in procedural or implicit memory, while considering the hypothesis that some forms of information may exploit long-term memory in parallel with working memory.