Psychological research and how to describe it

Since most programmers don’t read a lot of psychology research (or do you?), I bet few even know what it looks like. I found this in today’s new articles on PubMed, and I was so struck with the similarity of thinking and terminology in cognitive psychology to that of programming that I just wanted to share it for programmers to see. This is the abstract of Selection of objects and tasks in working memory (Risse & Oberauer, 2009):

When people hold several objects (such as digits or words) in working memory and select one for processing, switching to a new object takes longer than selecting the same object as that on the preceding processing step. Similarly, selecting a new task incurs task- switching costs. This work investigates the selection of objects and of tasks in working memory using a combination of object-switching and task-switching paradigms. Participants used spatial cues to select one digit held in working memory and colour cues to select one task (addition or subtraction) to apply to it. Across four experiments the mapping between objects and their cues and the mapping between tasks and their cues were varied orthogonally. When mappings varied from trial to trial for both objects and tasks, switch costs for objects and tasks were additive, as predicted by sequential selection or resource sharing. When at least one mapping was constant across trials, allowing learning of long-term associations, switch costs were underadditive, as predicted by partially parallel selection. The number of objects in working memory affected object-switch costs but not task-switch costs, counter to the notion of a general resource of executive attention.

(This is human memory, not computer memory. Wikipedia article about the working memory model)

Now it could be argued that this is because cognitive psychology uses a computer metaphor for the brain, and that is why it is so similar. But that is a whole other discussion.