Individual differences in controlling access to working memory (2005)

Here we report a neurophysiological measure of this memory selection mechanism in humans that gauges an individual’s efficiency at excluding irrelevant items from being stored in memory. Specifically, high capacity individuals are much more efficient at representing only the relevant items than are low capacity individuals, who inefficiently encode and maintain information about the irrelevant items present in the display. These results provide evidence that under many circumstances low capacity individuals may actually store more information in memory than high capacity individuals.

Source: www.nature.com