Cross-Text Connections

SAT Reading and Writing· difficulty 4/5

Text 1: Cognitive scientist Park argues that working memory is a limited and largely fixed cognitive resource. Decades of research show that adults can hold roughly four "chunks" of information in active memory at once; training programs that promise to expand working memory have repeatedly failed to produce gains that transfer to real-world tasks.

Text 2: Cognitive scientist Singh accepts the failure of capacity- expansion training but argues that the framing of working memory as fixed obscures something important. Strategies — chunking, visualization, deliberate practice — can dramatically extend what a learner does with a given capacity. Working memory may be bounded, Singh contends, but skilled use of it is highly expandable.

Based on the texts, how would Singh (Text 2) most likely respond to Park's framework?

  • A

    He would claim training programs reliably expand raw capacity.

  • B

    He would say strategies have no effect on cognitive performance.

  • C

    He would deny that working memory is bounded.

  • D

    He would accept the bound while arguing that effective use within it is highly expandable.

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Explanation

Singh accepts the capacity bound but emphasizes that strategies extend what can be done within it. B captures this.

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