# Validating an Online Portuguese Battery to Measure Working Memory Capacity in a Sample of Portuguese and Brazilian Participants

## TL;DR

This paper introduces and validates an online working memory test for Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese speakers, which can be adapted for other languages.

## Contribution

The study presents a new online working memory battery (oWMC-PT) validated for Portuguese-speaking populations with cross-sample invariance analysis.

## Key findings

- The oWMC-PT battery showed acceptable reliability and formed a single latent factor for working memory capacity.
- Configural and metric invariance was found between European and Brazilian Portuguese samples, but not scalar invariance.
- The battery is adaptable to other languages and accessible online for global use.

## Abstract

This article introduces a computerized set of online tasks suitable for measuring working memory capacity among European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese speakers (the oWMC-PT battery). The battery comprises three working memory measures: the reading span, the symmetry span, and the forward digit span. The tasks can be completed online at the participant’s own devices in approximately 30 min. The oWMC-PT was specifically designed for use with Portuguese and Brazilian populations but can be readily adapted for any language (and we provide an English version in our repository). The three tested tasks had acceptable reliability and correlated moderately, forming a single latent factor reflecting working memory capacity. We observed configural and metric invariance, but not scalar invariance, between the two tested samples of speakers of European Portuguese (N = 195) and Brazilian Portuguese (N = 154). This indicates that tasks load similarly to the latent factor in both samples, but latent scores between samples cannot be directly compared. The oWMC-PT task can serve as a versatile tool to assess working memory capacity in online samples – particularly in the Portuguese-speaking world, but potentially also in other languages. The battery is accessible at: https://osf.io/ubcez.