Working memory is typically measured with specifically designed psychological tasks. When evaluating the validity of working memory tasks, we commonly focus on the reliability of the outcome measurements. Only rarely do we focus on how participants experience these tasks. Accounting for lived experience of working memory task may help us better understand variability in working memory performance and conscious experience in general. We replicated recently established protocols for the phenomenological investigation of working memory using the visual span task. We collected subjective reports from eighteen healthy participants (10 women) aged 21 to 35 years. We observed that working memory can be phenomenologically characterized at three different time scales: background feelings, strategies, and tactics. On the level of tactics, we identified transmodality (i.e., how one modality of lived experience can be transformed into another one) as the central phenomenological dynamic at play during working memory task performance.

工作记忆通常是通过专门设计的心理任务来测量的。在评估工作记忆任务的有效性时，我们通常关注结果测量的可靠性。我们很少关注参与者如何体验这些任务。考虑工作记忆任务的生活经验可以帮助我们更好地理解工作记忆表现和一般意识体验的变异性。我们使用视觉跨度任务复制了最近建立的工作记忆现象学研究协议。我们收集了 18 名年龄在 21 至 35 岁之间的健康参与者（10 名女性）的主观报告。我们观察到，工作记忆可以在三个不同的时间尺度上进行现象学表征：背景感受、策略和战术。在策略层面上，我们将跨模态（即生活经验的一种模态如何转化为另一种模态）确定为工作记忆任务执行过程中发挥作用的中心现象学动力。