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Fixational eye movements occur involuntarily during visual fixation of stationary scenes. The fastest components of these miniature eye movements are microsaccades, which can be observed about once per second. Recent studies demonstrated that microsaccades are linked to covert shifts of visual attention. Here, we generalized this finding in two ways. First, we used peripheral cues, rather than the centrally presented cues of earlier studies. Second, we spatially cued attention in vision and audition to visual and auditory targets. An analysis of microsaccade responses revealed an equivalent impact of visual and auditory cues on microsaccade-rate signature (i.e. an initial inhibition followed by an overshoot and a final return to the pre-cue baseline rate). With visual cues or visual targets, microsaccades were briefly aligned with cue direction and then opposite to cue direction during the overshoot epoch, probably as a result of an inhibition of an automatic saccade to the peripheral cue. With left auditory cues and auditory targets microsaccades oriented in cue direction. We argue that microsaccades can be used to study crossmodal integration of sensory information and to map the time course of saccade preparation during covert shifts of visual and auditory attention
BackgroundIn spring of 2020, the Sars-CoV-2 incidence rate increased rapidly in Germany and around the world. Throughout the next 2 years, schools were temporarily closed and social distancing measures were put in place to slow the spread of the Covid-19 virus. Did these social restrictions and temporary school lockdowns affect children's physical fitness? The EMOTIKON project annually tests the physical fitness of all third-graders in the Federal State of Brandenburg, Germany. The tests assess cardiorespiratory endurance (6-min-run test), coordination (star-run test), speed (20-m sprint test), lower (powerLOW, standing long jump test), and upper (powerUP, ball-push test) limbs muscle power, and static balance (one-legged stance test with eyes closed). A total of 125,893 children were tested in the falls from 2016 to 2022. Primary analyses focused on 98,510 keyage third-graders (i.e., school enrollment according to the legal key date, aged 8 to 9 years) from 515 schools. Secondary analyses included 27,383 older-than-keyage third-graders (i.e., OTK, delayed school enrollment or repetition of a grade, aged 9 to 10 years), who have been shown to exhibit lower physical fitness than expected for their age. Linear mixed models fitted pre-pandemic quadratic secular trends, and took into account differences between children and schools.ResultsThird-graders exhibited lower cardiorespiratory endurance, coordination, speed and powerUP in the Covid pandemic cohorts (2020-2022) compared to the pre-pandemic cohorts (2016-2019). Children's powerLOW and static balance were higher in the pandemic cohorts compared to the pre-pandemic cohorts. From 2020 to 2021, coordination, powerLOW and powerUP further declined. Evidence for some post-pandemic physical fitness catch-up was restricted to powerUP. Cohen's |ds| for comparisons of the pandemic cohorts 2020-2022 with pre-pandemic cohorts 2016-2019 ranged from 0.02 for powerLOW to 0.15 for coordination. Within the pandemic cohorts, keyage children exhibited developmental losses ranging from approximately 1 month for speed to 5 months for cardiorespiratory endurance. For powerLOW and static balance, the positive pandemic effects translate to developmental gains of 1 and 7 months, respectively. Pre-pandemic secular trends may account for some of the observed differences between pandemic and pre-pandemic cohorts, especially in powerLOW, powerUP and static balance. The pandemic further increased developmental delays of OTK children in cardiorespiratory endurance, powerUP and balance.ConclusionsThe Covid-19 pandemic was associated with declines in several physical fitness components in German third-graders. Pandemic effects are still visible in 2022. Health-related interventions should specifically target those physical fitness components that were negatively affected by the pandemic (cardiorespiratory endurance, coordination, speed).
Brain-electric correlates of reading have traditionally been studied with word-by-word presentation, a condition that eliminates important aspects of the normal reading process and precludes direct comparisons between neural activity and oculomotor behavior. In the present study, we investigated effects of word predictability on eye movements (EM) and fixation-related brain potentials (FRPs) during natural sentence reading. Electroencephalogram (EEG) and EM (via video-based eye tracking) were recorded simultaneously while subjects read heterogeneous German sentences, moving their eyes freely over the text. FRPs were time-locked to first-pass reading fixations and analyzed according to the cloze probability of the currently fixated word. We replicated robust effects of word predictability on EMs and the N400 component in FRPs. The data were then used to model the relation among fixation duration, gaze duration, and N400 amplitude, and to trace the time course of EEG effects relative to effects in EM behavior. In an extended Methodological Discussion section, we review 4 technical and data-analytical problems that need to be addressed when FRPs are recorded in free-viewing situations (such as reading, visual search, or scene perception) and propose solutions. Results suggest that EEG recordings during normal vision are feasible and useful to consolidate findings from EEG and eye-tracking studies.
Word recognition in sentence reading is influenced by information from both preview and context. Recently, semantic preview effect (SPE) was observed being modulated by the constraint of context, indicating that context might accelerate the processing of semantically related preview words. Besides, SPE was found to depend on preview time, which suggests that SPE may change with different processing stages of preview words. Therefore, it raises the question of whether preview time-dependent SPE would be modulated by contextual constraint. In this study, we not only investigated the impact of contextual constraint on SPE in Chinese reading but also examined its dependency on preview time. The preview word and the target word were identical, semantically related or unrelated to the target word. The results showed a significant three-way interaction: The SPE depended on contextual constraint and preview time. In separate analyses for low and high contextual constraint of target words, the SPE significantly decreased with an increase in preview duration when the target word was of low constraint in the sentence. The effect was numerically in the same direction but weaker and statistically nonsignificant when the target word was highly constrained in the sentence. The results indicate that word processing in sentences is a dynamic process of integrating information from both preview (bottom-up) and context (top-down).
Concluding observations
(1999)
During reading, our eyes perform complicated sequences of fixations on words. Stochastic models of eye movement control suggest that this seemingly erratic behaviour can be attributed to noise in the oculomotor system and random fluctuations in lexical processing. Here, we present a qualitative analysis of a recently published dynamical model [Engbert et al., 2002] and propose that deterministic nonlinear control accounts for much of the observed complexity of eye movement patterns during reading. Based on a symbolic coding technique we analyze robust statistical features of simulated fixation sequences
Cognitive plasticity
(2002)
This article introduces childLex, an online database of German read by children. childLex is based on a corpus of children's books and comprises 10 million words that were syntactically annotated and lemmatized. childLex reports linguistic norms for lexical, superlexical, and sublexical variables in three different age groups: 6-8 (grades 1-2), 9-10 (grades 3-4), and 11-12 years (grades 5-6). Here, we describe how childLex was collected and analyzed. In addition, we provide information about the distributions of word frequency, word length, and orthographic neighborhood size, as well as their intercorrelations. Finally, we explain how childLex can be accessed using a Web interface.
As a contribution to a theoretical debate about the degree of high-level influences on saccade targeting during sentence reading, we investigated eye movements during the reading of structurally ambiguous Chinese character strings and examined whether parafoveal word segmentation could influence saccade-target selection. As expected, ambiguous strings took longer to process. More critically there were theoretically relevant interactions between ambiguity and launch site when first-fixation location and saccade amplitude served as dependent variables: Ambiguous strings in the parafovea triggered longer saccades and more rightward fixations for close launch sites than unambiguous ones; the reverse result was obtained for far launch sites. These crossover interactions indicate that parafoveal word segmentation influences saccade generation in Chinese and provide support of the hypothesis that high-level information can be involved in the decision about where to fixate next.
Benefits of graphic design expertise in old age : compensatory effects of a graphical lexicon?
(2008)
Background: Dynamic balance keeps the vertical projection of the center of mass within the base of support while walking. Dynamic balance tests are used to predict the risks of falls and eventual falls. The psychometric properties of most dynamic balance tests are unsatisfactory and do not comprise an actual loss of balance while walking. Objectives: Using beam walking distance as a measure of dynamic balance, the BEAM consortium will determine the psychometric properties, lifespan and patient reference values, the relationship with selected “dynamic balance tests,” and the accuracy of beam walking distance to predict falls. Methods: This cross-sectional observational study will examine healthy adults in 7 decades (n = 432) at 4 centers. Center 5 will examine patients (n = 100) diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, stroke, and balance disorders. In test 1, all participants will be measured for demographics, medical history, muscle strength, gait, static balance, dynamic balance using beam walking under single (beam walking only) and dual task conditions (beam walking while concurrently performing an arithmetic task), and several cognitive functions. Patients and healthy participants age 50 years or older will be additionally measured for fear of falling, history of falls, miniBESTest, functional reach on a force platform, timed up and go, and reactive balance. All participants age 50 years or older will be recalled to report fear of falling and fall history 6 and 12 months after test 1. In test 2, seven to ten days after test 1, healthy young adults and age 50 years or older (n = 40) will be retested for reliability of beam walking performance. Conclusion: We expect to find that beam walking performance vis-à-vis the traditionally used balance outcomes predicts more accurately fall risks and falls. Clinical Trial Registration Number: NCT03532984.
Basic psychological needs theory postulates that a social environment that satisfies individuals’ three basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness leads to optimal growth and well-being. On the other hand, the frustration of these needs is associated with ill-being and depressive symptoms foremost investigated in non-clinical samples; yet, there is a paucity of research on need frustration in clinical samples. Survey data were compared between adult individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD; n = 115; 48.69% female; 38.46 years, SD = 10.46) with those of a non-depressed comparison sample (n = 201; 53.23% female; 30.16 years, SD = 12.81). Need profiles were examined with a linear mixed model (LMM). Individuals with depression reported higher levels of frustration and lower levels of satisfaction in relation to the three basic psychological needs when compared to non-depressed adults. The difference between depressed and non-depressed groups was significantly larger for frustration than satisfaction regarding the needs for relatedness and competence. LMM correlation parameters confirmed the expected positive correlation between the three needs. This is the first study showing substantial differences in need-based experiences between depressed and non-depressed adults. The results confirm basic assumptions of the self-determination theory and have preliminary implications in tailoring therapy for depression.
Basic psychological needs theory postulates that a social environment that satisfies individuals’ three basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness leads to optimal growth and well-being. On the other hand, the frustration of these needs is associated with ill-being and depressive symptoms foremost investigated in non-clinical samples; yet, there is a paucity of research on need frustration in clinical samples. Survey data were compared between adult individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD; n = 115; 48.69% female; 38.46 years, SD = 10.46) with those of a non-depressed comparison sample (n = 201; 53.23% female; 30.16 years, SD = 12.81). Need profiles were examined with a linear mixed model (LMM). Individuals with depression reported higher levels of frustration and lower levels of satisfaction in relation to the three basic psychological needs when compared to non-depressed adults. The difference between depressed and non-depressed groups was significantly larger for frustration than satisfaction regarding the needs for relatedness and competence. LMM correlation parameters confirmed the expected positive correlation between the three needs. This is the first study showing substantial differences in need-based experiences between depressed and non-depressed adults. The results confirm basic assumptions of the self-determination theory and have preliminary implications in tailoring therapy for depression.
Linear mixed-effects models have increasingly replaced mixed-model analyses of variance for statistical inference in factorial psycholinguistic experiments. Although LMMs have many advantages over ANOVA, like ANOVAs, setting them up for data analysis also requires some care. One simple option, when numerically possible, is to fit the full variance covariance structure of random effects (the maximal model; Barr, Levy, Scheepers & Tily, 2013), presumably to keep Type I error down to the nominal a in the presence of random effects. Although it is true that fitting a model with only random intercepts may lead to higher Type I error, fitting a maximal model also has a cost: it can lead to a significant loss of power. We demonstrate this with simulations and suggest that for typical psychological and psycholinguistic data, higher power is achieved without inflating Type I error rate if a model selection criterion is used to select a random effect structure that is supported by the data. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc.
Are individual differences in reading speed related to extrafoveal visual acuity and crowding?
(2015)
Readers differ considerably in their speed of self-paced reading. One factor known to influence fixation durations in reading is the preprocessing of words in parafoveal vision. Here we investigated whether individual differences in reading speed or the amount of information extracted from upcoming words (the preview benefit) can be explained by basic differences in extrafoveal vision-i.e., the ability to recognize peripheral letters with or without the presence of flanking letters. Forty participants were given an adaptive test to determine their eccentricity thresholds for the identification of letters presented either in isolation (extrafoveal acuity) or flanked by other letters (crowded letter recognition). In a separate eye-tracking experiment, the same participants read lists of words from left to right, while the preview of the upcoming words was manipulated with the gaze-contingent moving window technique. Relationships between dependent measures were analyzed on the observational level and with linear mixed models. We obtained highly reliable estimates both for extrafoveal letter identification (acuity and crowding) and measures of reading speed (overall reading speed, size of preview benefit). Reading speed was higher in participants with larger uncrowded windows. However, the strength of this relationship was moderate and it was only observed if other sources of variance in reading speed (e.g., the occurrence of regressive saccades) were eliminated. Moreover, the size of the preview benefit-an important factor in normal reading-was larger in participants with better extrafoveal acuity. Together, these results indicate a significant albeit moderate contribution of extrafoveal vision to individual differences in reading speed.
Are Individual Differences in Reading Speed Related to Extrafoveal Visual Acuity and Crowding?
(2015)
Readers differ considerably in their speed of self-paced reading. One factor known to influence fixation durations in reading is the preprocessing of words in parafoveal vision. Here we investigated whether individual differences in reading speed or the amount of information extracted from upcoming words (the preview benefit) can be explained by basic differences in extrafoveal vision-i.e., the ability to recognize peripheral letters with or without the presence of flanking letters. Forty participants were given an adaptive test to determine their eccentricity thresholds for the identification of letters presented either in isolation (extrafoveal acuity) or flanked by other letters (crowded letter recognition). In a separate eye-tracking experiment, the same participants read lists of words from left to right, while the preview of the upcoming words was manipulated with the gaze-contingent moving window technique. Relationships between dependent measures were analyzed on the observational level and with linear mixed models. We obtained highly reliable estimates both for extrafoveal letter identification (acuity and crowding) and measures of reading speed (overall reading speed, size of preview benefit). Reading speed was higher in participants with larger uncrowded windows. However, the strength of this relationship was moderate and it was only observed if other sources of variance in reading speed (e.g., the occurrence of regressive saccades) were eliminated. Moreover, the size of the preview benefit-an important factor in normal reading-was larger in participants with better extrafoveal acuity. Together, these results indicate a significant albeit moderate contribution of extrafoveal vision to individual differences in reading speed.
An update on secular trends in physical fitness of children and adolescents from 1972 to 2015
(2020)
Background There is evidence that physical fitness of children and adolescents (particularly cardiorespiratory endurance) has declined globally over the past decades. Ever since the first reports on negative trends in physical fitness, efforts have been undertaken by for instance the World Health Organization (WHO) to promote physical activity and fitness in children and adolescents. Therefore, it is timely to re-analyze the literature to examine whether previous reports on secular declines in physical fitness are still detectable or whether they need to be updated. Objectives The objective of this systematic review is to provide an 'update' on secular trends in selected components of physical fitness (i.e., cardiorespiratory endurance, relative muscle strength, proxies of muscle power, speed) in children and adolescents aged 6-18 years. Data Sources A systematic computerized literature search was conducted in the electronic databases PubMed and Web of Science to locate studies that explicitly reported secular trends in physical fitness of children and adolescents. Study Eligibility Criteria Studies were included in this systematic review if they examined secular trends between at least two time points across a minimum of 5 years. In addition, they had to document secular trends in any measure of cardiorespiratory endurance, relative muscle strength, proxies of muscle power or speed in apparently healthy children and adolescents aged 6-18 years. Study Appraisal and Synthesis Methods The included studies were coded for the following criteria: nation, physical fitness component (cardiorespiratory endurance, relative muscle strength, proxies of muscle power, speed), chronological age, sex (boys vs. girls), and year of assessment. Scores were standardized (i.e., converted to z scores) with sample-weighted means and standard deviations, pooled across sex and year of assessment within cells defined by study, test, and children's age. Results The original search identified 524 hits. In the end, 22 studies met the inclusion criteria for review. The observation period was between 1972 and 2015. Fifteen of the 22 studies used tests for cardiorespiratory endurance, eight for relative muscle strength, eleven for proxies of muscle power, and eight for speed. Measures of cardiorespiratory endurance exhibited a large initial increase and an equally large subsequent decrease, but the decrease appears to have reached a floor for all children between 2010 and 2015. Measures of relative muscle strength showed a general trend towards a small increase. Measures of proxies of muscle power indicated an overall small negative quadratic trend. For measures of speed, a small-to-medium increase was observed in recent years. Limitations Biological maturity was not considered in the analysis because biological maturity was not reported in most included studies. Conclusions Negative secular trends were particularly found for cardiorespiratory endurance between 1986 and 2010-12, irrespective of sex. Relative muscle strength and speed showed small increases while proxies of muscle power declined. Although the negative trend in cardiorespiratory endurance appears to have reached a floor in recent years, because of its association with markers of health, we recommend further initiatives in PA and fitness promotion for children and adolescents. More specifically, public health efforts should focus on exercise that increases cardiorespiratory endurance to prevent adverse health effects (i.e. <br /> , overweight and obesity) and muscle strength to lay a foundation for motor skill learning.
An lterative algorithm for the estimation of the distribution of mislocated fixations during reading
(2007)
Binocular eye movements of normal adult readers were examined as they read single sentences. Analyses of horizontal and vertical fixation disparities indicated that the most prevalent type of disparate fixation is crossed (i.e., the left eye is located further to the right than the right eye) while the left eye frequently fixates somewhat above the right eye. The Gaussian distribution of the binocular fixation point peaked 2.6 cm in front of the plane of text, reflecting the prevalence of horizontally crossed fixations. Fixation disparity accumulates during the course of successive saccades and fixations within a line of text, but only to an extent that does not compromise single binocular vision. In reading, the version and vergence system interact in a way that is qualitatively similar to what has been observed in simple nonreading tasks. Finally, results presented here render it unlikely that vergence movements in reading aim at realigning the eyes at a given saccade target word.
This study investigated whether older adults could acquire the ability to perform 2 cognitive operations in parallel in a paradigm in which young adults had been shown to be able to do so (K. Oberauer & R. Kliegl, 2004). Twelve young and 12 older adults practiced a numerical and a visuospatial continuous memory updating task in single-task and dual-task conditions for 16 to 24 sessions. After practice, 9 young adults were able to process the 2 tasks without dual- task costs, but none of the older adults had reached the criterion of parallel processing. The results suggest a qualitative difference between young and older adults in how they approach dual-task situations.
Children’s physical fitness development and related moderating effects of age and sex are well documented, especially boys’ and girls’ divergence during puberty. The situation might be different during prepuberty. As girls mature approximately two years earlier than boys, we tested a possible convergence of performance with five tests representing four components of physical fitness in a large sample of 108,295 eight-year old third-graders. Within this single prepubertal year of life and irrespective of the test, performance increased linearly with chronological age, and boys outperformed girls to a larger extent in tests requiring muscle mass for successful performance. Tests differed in the magnitude of age effects (gains), but there was no evidence for an interaction between age and sex. Moreover, “physical fitness” of schools correlated at r = 0.48 with their age effect which might imply that "fit schools” promote larger gains; expected secular trends from 2011 to 2019 were replicated.
Children’s physical fitness development and related moderating effects of age and sex are well documented, especially boys’ and girls’ divergence during puberty. The situation might be different during prepuberty. As girls mature approximately two years earlier than boys, we tested a possible convergence of performance with five tests representing four components of physical fitness in a large sample of 108,295 eight-year old third-graders. Within this single prepubertal year of life and irrespective of the test, performance increased linearly with chronological age, and boys outperformed girls to a larger extent in tests requiring muscle mass for successful performance. Tests differed in the magnitude of age effects (gains), but there was no evidence for an interaction between age and sex. Moreover, “physical fitness” of schools correlated at r = 0.48 with their age effect which might imply that "fit schools” promote larger gains; expected secular trends from 2011 to 2019 were replicated.
Following up on research suggesting an age-related reduction in the rightward extent of the perceptual span during reading (Rayner, Castelhano, & Yang, 2009), we compared old and young adults in an N + 2-boundary paradigm in which a nonword preview of word N + 2 or word N + 2 itself is replaced by the target word once the eyes cross an invisible boundary located after word N. The intermediate word N + I was always three letters long. Gaze durations on word N + 2 were significantly shorter for identical than nonword N + 2 preview both for young and for old adults, with no significant difference in this preview benefit. Young adults, however, did modulate their gaze duration on word N more strongly than old adults in response to the difficulty of the parafoveal word N + I. Taken together, the results suggest a dissociation of preview benefit and parafoveal-on-foveal effect. Results are discussed in terms of age-related decline in resilience towards distributed processing while simultaneously preserving the ability to integrate parafoveal information into foveal processing. As such, the present results relate to proposals of regulatory compensation strategies older adults use to secure an overall reading speed very similar to that of young adults.
Following up on research suggesting an age-related reduction in the rightward extent of the perceptual span during reading (Rayner, Castelhano, & Yang, 2009), we compared old and young adults in an N + 2-boundary paradigm in which a nonword preview of word N + 2 or word N + 2 itself is replaced by the target word once the eyes cross an invisible boundary located after word N. The intermediate word N + 1 was always three letters long. Gaze durations on word N + 2 were significantly shorter for identical than nonword N + 2 preview both for young and for old adults, with no significant difference in this preview benefit. Young adults, however, did modulate their gaze duration on word N more strongly than old adults in response to the difficulty of the parafoveal word N + 1. Taken together, the results suggest a dissociation of preview benefit and parafoveal-on-foveal effect. Results are discussed in terms of age-related decline in resilience towards distributed processing while simultaneously preserving the ability to integrate parafoveal information into foveal processing. As such, the present results relate to proposals of regulatory compensation strategies older adults use to secure an overall reading speed very similar to that of young adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)
Parafoveal semantic processing has recently been well documented in reading Chinese sentences, presumably because of language-specific features. However, because of a large variation of fixation landing positions on pretarget words, some preview words actually were located in foveal vision when readers' eyes landed close to the end of the pretarget words. None of the previous studies has completely ruled out a possibility that the semantic preview effects might mainly arise from these foveally processed preview words. This case, whether previously observed positive evidence for parafoveal semantic processing can still hold, has been called into question. Using linear mixed models, we demonstrate in this study that semantic preview benefit from word N+1 decreased if fixation on pretarget word N was close to the preview. We argue that parafoveal semantic processing is not a consequence of foveally processed preview words.
Eye-movement experiments suggest that the perceptual span during reading is larger than the fixated word, asymmetric around the fixation position, and shrinks in size contingent on the foveal processing load. We used the SWIFT model of eye-movement control during reading to test these hypotheses and their implications under the assumption of graded parallel processing of all words inside the perceptual span. Specifically, we simulated reading in the boundary paradigm and analysed the effects of denying the model to have valid preview of a parafoveal word n + 2 two words to the right of fixation. Optimizing the model parameters for the valid preview condition only, we obtained span parameters with remarkably realistic estimates conforming to the empirical findings on the size of the perceptual span. More importantly, the SWIFT model generated parafoveal processing up to word n + 2 without fitting the model to such preview effects. Our results suggest that asymmetry and dynamic modulation are plausible properties of the perceptual span in a parallel word-processing model such as SWIFT. Moreover, they seem to guide the flexible distribution of processing resources during reading between foveal and parafoveal words.
We explore the interaction between oculomotor control and language comprehension on the sentence level using two well-tested computational accounts of parsing difficulty. Previous work (Boston, Hale, Vasishth, & Kliegl, 2011) has shown that surprisal (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) and cue-based memory retrieval (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) are significant and complementary predictors of reading time in an eyetracking corpus. It remains an open question how the sentence processor interacts with oculomotor control. Using a simple linking hypothesis proposed in Reichle, Warren, and McConnell (2009), we integrated both measures with the eye movement model EMMA (Salvucci, 2001) inside the cognitive architecture ACT-R (Anderson et al., 2004). We built a reading model that could initiate short Time Out regressions (Mitchell, Shen, Green, & Hodgson, 2008) that compensate for slow postlexical processing. This simple interaction enabled the model to predict the re-reading of words based on parsing difficulty. The model was evaluated in different configurations on the prediction of frequency effects on the Potsdam Sentence Corpus. The extension of EMMA with postlexical processing improved its predictions and reproduced re-reading rates and durations with a reasonable fit to the data. This demonstration, based on simple and independently motivated assumptions, serves as a foundational step toward a precise investigation of the interaction between high-level language processing and eye movement control.
A mathematical model of working-memory capacity limits is proposed on the key assumption of mutual interference between items in working memory. Interference is assumed to arise from overwriting of features shared by these items. The model was fit to time-accuracy data of memory-updating tasks from four experiments using nonlinear mixed effect (NLME) models as a framework. The model gave a good account of the data from a numerical and a spatial task version. The performance pattern in a combination of numerical and spatial updating could be explained by variations in the interference parameter: assuming less feature overlap between contents from different domains than between contents from the same domain, the model can account for double dissociations of content domains in dual-task experiments. Experiment 3 extended this idea to similarity within the verbal domain. The decline of memory accuracy with increasing memory load was steeper with phonologically similar than with dissimilar material, although processing speed was faster for the similar material. The model captured the similarity effects with a higher estimated interference parameter for the similar than for the dissimilar condition. The results are difficult to explain with alternative models, in particular models incorporating time-based decay and models assuming limited resource pools.