A formal model of capacity limits in working memory

By Klaus Oberauer, Reinhold Kliegl. 2006

378 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A mathematical model of working-memory capacity limits is proposed on the key assumption of mutual interference between items in working memory. Interference is assumed to arise from overwriting of features shared by these items. The model was fit to time-accuracy data of memory-updating tasks from four experiments using nonlinear mixed effect (NLME) models as a framework. The model gave a good account of the data from a numerical and a spatial task ver- sion. The performance pattern in a combination of numerical and spatial updating could be explained by variations in the interference parameter: assuming less feature overlap between contents from different domains than between con- tents from the same domain, the model can account for double dissociations of content domains in dual-task experi- ments. Experiment 3 extended this idea to similarity within the verbal domain. The decline of memory accuracy with increasing memory load was steeper with phonologically similar than with dissimilar material, although processing speed was faster for the similar material. The model captured the similarity effects with a higher estimated interference parameter for the similar than for the dissimilar condition. The results are difficult to explain with alternative models, in particular models incorporating time-based decay and models assuming limited resource pools. Journal of Memory and Language 55 (2006) 601–626 Journal of Memory and Language

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8f704b15f7ee3c798960ef7870d2af66328d34cb

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Citations in the corpus

An Interference Model of Visual Working Memory (2017, background): “Interference models have been very successful in explaining a large range of phenomena from experiments on WM, including phenomena reflecting the system’s limited capacity (Jonides et al., 2008; Lewandowsky & Farrell, 2008; Nairne, 1990; Oberauer & Kliegl, 2006; Oberauer, Lewandowsky, et al., 2012).”
Which Working Memory Functions Predict Intelligence (2008, background): “We believe that this limiting factor is reflected in working memory capacity (Oberauer & Kliegl, 2006).”
Similarity-based interference in sentence comprehension: Literature review and Bayesian meta-analysis (2017, methodology): “, in the content-addressable memory odel proposed by Oberauer and Kliegl (2006), the activation level of a memory item ecreases as a function of the number of features it shares with other items and as a nction of the number of other items it shares features with.”
Attention to Information in Working Memory (2012, background): “In conditions that largely exclude contributions from LTM, people can hold approximately three to four independent items in working memory (Fukuda, Awh, & Vogel, 2010; Oberauer & Kliegl, 2006).”
Two maintenance mechanisms of verbal information in working memory (2009, background): “Indeed, irrelevant information either issued from the environment or stored in long-term memory could interfere with the information to maintain (Oberauer & Kliegl, 2006; Oberauer & Lewandowsky, 2008), whether this information is maintained only for temporary storage purpose or because it is…”
Design for a working memory. (2009, background): “…modeling, among them the superposition of content–context bindings in a common weight matrix (Farrell & Lewandowsky, 2002; Oberauer & Lewandowsky, 2008), and the overwriting of features shared by different contents in the DA region (Nairne, 1990; Oberauer & Kliegl, 2006; Oberauer & Lange, 2008).”
Parsimonious Mixed Models (2015, background): “Although hierarchical linear models have been in existence for decades, their adoption in areas like psychology and linguistics became more widespread in areas like linguistics and psychology after Pinheiro and Bates (2000) appeared (Vasishth, 2003; Vasishth and Lewis, 2006; Baayen et al., 2008; Obe”
An assessment of fixed-capacity models of visual working memory (2008, background): “Nonetheless, there are dissenting viewpoints in which the discreteness is taken as, at most, a convenient oversimplification (6, 7).”
The mind and brain of short-term memory. (2008, background): “Unitary-store models focus on central capacity limits, irrespective of modality, but they do allow for separate resources (Cowan 2000) or feature components (Lange & Oberauer 2005, Oberauer & Kliegl 2006) that occur at lower levels of perception and representation.”