The Magical Mystery Four: How is Working Memory Capacity Limited, and Why?

By Nelson Cowan. 2010

1,034 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Working memory storage capacity is important because cognitive tasks can be completed only with sufficient ability to hold information as it is processed. The ability to repeat information depends on task demands but can be distinguished from a more constant, underlying mechanism: a central memory store limited to 3 to 5 meaningful items for young adults. I discuss why this central limit is important, how it can be observed, how it differs among individuals, and why it may exist.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Please Stop Explaining Black Box Models for High Stakes Decisions (2018, neutral): “Often for structured data, sparsity is a useful measure of interpretability, since humans can handle at most 7 ± 2 cognitive entities at once [Miller, 1956, Cowan, 2010].”
One-shot Learning with Memory-Augmented Neural Networks (2016, positive): “For all intents and purposes, as the number of classes scale to ﬁfteen and beyond, this type of binding surpasses human working memory capacity, which is limited to storing only a handful of arbitrary bindings (Cowan, 2010).”
How much of reinforcement learning is working memory, not reinforcement learning? A behavioral, computational, and neurogenetic analysis (2012, positive): “Notably, the capacity estimate ranged between 3 and 4 for most subjects, coherent with the widely accepted values in the existing literature (Cowan, 2010).”
Attention Restoration Theory: Exploring the Role of Soft Fascination and Mental Bandwidth (2019, positive): “These indicate that working memory capacity is limited (Cowan, 2010), implying that bandwidth can be used up completely as in the cases of hard fascination or hard focus.”
Meta-Learning with Memory-Augmented Neural Networks (2016, background): “For all intents and purposes , as the number of classes scale to fifteen and beyond, this type of binding surpasses human working memory capacity , which is limited to storing only a handful of arbitrary bindings (Cowan, 2010).”
The mind behind anthropomorphic thinking: attribution of mental states to other species (2015, neutral): “The working memory system is restricted by the quantity of information that it can hold (Cowan, 2010), and by the time lapse during which information can be stored (Baddeley, Thomson, & Buchanan, 1975).”
Cognitive Offloading. (2016, neutral): “, we can only accurately perceive a relatively small region of the visual field [7] and can only hold a limited amount of information active in memory [8]).”
Individual differences in L2 acquisition of English phonology: The relation between cognitive abilities and phonological processing☆ (2015, positive): “Short-term and working memory (WM) vary among individuals (Baddeley, 2003; Cowan, 2010) andmay underlie individual differences in language acquisition (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980; Miyake & Friedman, 1998).”
Working Memory 2.0 (2018, positive): “In the model, the refresh rate is responsible for the limited capacity of working memory (an average of four items; Awh et al., 2007; Buschman et al., 2011; Cowan, 2010; Luck and Vogel, 1997).”
Improved matrix reasoning is limited to training on tasks with a visuospatial component (2013, neutral): “Working memory capacity (WMC) refers to the number of units (i.e., amount of information) that can be stored while processing incoming information and ignoring irrelevant information and, is often referred to as the control mechanism in WM (Cowan, 2010).”
Educating the Developing Mind: Towards an Overarching Paradigm (2011, neutral): “formation of action plans, and problem solving (Baddeley 1990; Cowan 2010; Engel de Abreu et al. 2010).”
The effectiveness of virtual and augmented reality in health sciences and medical anatomy (2017, positive): “A person is only able to process three to five “chunks of information” at the same time, therefore anything that exceeds simple cognitive activities may overwhelm the working memory and one’s cognitive resources (Cowan, 2010).”
Making the Black Box of Collaborative Learning Transparent: Combining Process-Oriented and Cognitive Load Approaches (2010, positive): “In this context, the limited processing capacity of a learner’s working memory (WM) is considered a bottleneck (Baddeley 1986; Miller 1956); for new, yet to be learned information, its processing capacity is limited to only 4±1 elements (Cowan 2010), and if a learning environment is too cognitively ”
Working Memory Underpins Cognitive Development, Learning, and Education (2013, neutral): “Recent investigators have considered multiple possible reasons why primary memory might be limited to just a few items at once, including biological accounts based on the need to avoid confusion between concurrent objects in memory, and evolutionary and teleological accounts based on ideas about wha”
Getting the point: Tracing worked examples enhances learning (2015, neutral): “Cowan (2001, 2010) argued that the capacity of working memory varies across a variety of circumstances, depending on the types of tasks; for instance, whether processing such as rehearsal or grouping is allowed to perform a given task.”
Object focused q-learning for autonomous agents (2013, neutral): “Adult humans are consciously aware of only one stimulus out of each 3 hundred thousand received [22], and they can only hold a maximum of 3 to 5 meaningful items or chunks [1] in their short-term memory.”