Discrete Capacity Limits in Visual Working Memory

By Keisuke Fukuda, Edward Awh, Edward K. Vogel. 2010

292 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The amount of information we can actively maintain “in mind” is very limited. This capacity limitation, as known as working memory capacity, has been of great interest due to its wide scope influence on the variety of intellectual abilities. Recently, there has been an ongoing debate about how this capacity should best be characterized. One viewpoint argues that working memory capacity is allocated in a discrete fashion with an upper limit of 3-4 representations. An alternative viewpoint argues that the capacity can be allocated in a continuous fashion with no upper limit in the number of representations. In this article, we will review recent neurobiological and behavioral evidence that has helped shape the debate regarding one of the more central mechanisms in cognitive neuroscience.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

On the Binding Problem in Artificial Neural Networks (2020, background): “Indeed, the capacity of the human working memory is generally believed to only be around 3–9 objects (Fukuda et al., 2010; Miller, 1956).”
Memory, Visual Discrimination Performance, and the Human Hippocampus (2011, background): “Typically, only three to four simple visual objects can be maintained (Cowan, 2001; Fukuda et al., 2010).”
Neural substrates of cognitive capacity limitations (2011, background): “Discrete-resource models suggest that capacity depends on a limited number of slot-like, independent resources (3, 10, 11) whereas flexible-resource models suggest a resource pool that can be subdivided among items (12–14).”