TY - JOUR AU - Gasimova, Fidan AU - Robitzsch, Alexander AU - Wilhelm, Oliver AU - Boker, Steven M. AU - Hu, Yueqin AU - Hülür, Gizem PY - 2014 M3 - Methods TI - Dynamical systems analysis applied to working memory data JO - Frontiers in Psychology UR - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00687 VL - 5 SN - 1664-1078 N2 - In the present paper we investigate weekly fluctuations in the working memory capacity (WMC) assessed over a period of 2 years. We use dynamical system analysis, specifically a second order linear differential equation, to model weekly variability in WMC in a sample of 112 9th graders. In our longitudinal data we use a B-spline imputation method to deal with missing data. The results show a significant negative frequency parameter in the data, indicating a cyclical pattern in weekly memory updating performance across time. We use a multilevel modeling approach to capture individual differences in model parameters and find that a higher initial performance level and a slower improvement at the MU task is associated with a slower frequency of oscillation. Additionally, we conduct a simulation study examining the analysis procedure's performance using different numbers of B-spline knots and values of time delay embedding dimensions. Results show that the number of knots in the B-spline imputation influence accuracy more than the number of embedding dimensions. ER -