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How working memory supports dual-task performance is the focus of a long-standing debate. Most previous research on this topic has focused on participant performance data. In three experiments, we investigated whether changes in participant-reported strategies across single- and dual-task conditions might help resolve this debate by offering new insights that lead to fruitful integration of theories rather than perpetuating debate by attempting to identify which theory best fits the data. Results indicated that articulatory suppression was associated with reduced reports of the use of rehearsal and clustering strategies but to an increase of the reported use of a visual strategy. Elaboration and clustering strategies were reported less for memory under dual task compared with single task. Under both dual task and articulatory suppression, more participants reported attempting to remember fewer memory items than were presented (memory reduction strategy). For arithmetic verification, articulatory suppression and dual task resulted in a reduction in reports of a counting strategy and an increase in reports of a retrieval strategy for arithmetic knowledge. It is argued that experimenters should not assume that participants perform the same task in the same way under different experimental conditions and that carefulty investigation of how participants change their strategies in response to changes in experimental conditions has considerable potential for resolving theoretical challenges. It is argued further that this approach points toward the value of attempting to integrate rather than proliferate theories of working memory.

Theories of working memory often disagree on the relationships between processing and storage, particularly on how heavily they rely on an attention-based limited resource. Some posit separation and specialization of resources resulting in minimal interference to memory when completing an ongoing processing task, while others argue for a greater overlap in the resources involved in concurrent tasks. Here, we present four experiments that investigated the presence or absence of dual-task costs for memory and processing. The experiments were carried in an adversarial collaboration in which researchers from three opposing theories collaboratively designed a set of experiments and provided differential predictions in line with each of their models. Participants performed delayed recall of aurally and visually presented letters and an arithmetic verification task either as single tasks or with the arithmetic verification task between presentation and recall of letter sequences. Single- and dual-task conditions were completed with and without concurrent articulatory suppression. A consistent pattern of dual-task and suppression costs was observed for memory, with smaller or null effects on processing. The observed data did not fit perfectly with any one framework, with each model having partial success in predicting data patterns. Implications for each of the models are discussed, with an aim for future research to investigate whether some combination of the models and their assumptions can provide a more comprehensive interpretation of the pattern of effects observed here and in relevant previous studies associated with each theoretical framework.