Changing concepts of working memory

By Wei Ji Ma, Masud Husain, Paul M. Bays. Nature Neuroscience, 2014

1,041 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Working memory is widely considered to be limited in capacity, holding a fixed, small number of items, such as Miller's 'magical number' seven or Cowan's four. It has recently been proposed that working memory might better be conceptualized as a limited resource that is distributed flexibly among all items to be maintained in memory. According to this view, the quality rather than the quantity of working memory representations determines performance. Here we consider behavioral and emerging neural evidence for this proposal.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c2dafd8ba16b8681ef60b33246a6ab127459289c

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

The Distributed Nature of Working Memory. (2017, background): “Behavioral models assume either a slot-based [180,181] or resource-based [182,183] limitation of capacity.”
Learning Decision Trees Recurrently Through Communication (2021, background): “Optimizing representations to be sparse [66] when seeking interpretability [60] draws some resemblance with the working memory of humans [40], which is limited to a handful of items at the same time.”
Toward a Rational and Mechanistic Account of Mental Effort. (2017, background): “2012, Luck & Vogel 1997) or continuous resources (Ma et al. 2014); interference between the representations held in working memory (Nairne 1990, Oberauer & Kliegl 2006); and/or passive decay ( Jensen 1988, Page & Norris 1998) (for a comparative review of these accounts, see Oberauer et al.”
Time-Based Binding as a Solution to and a Limitation for Flexible Cognition (2021, methodology): “This data pattern was interpreted in terms of a continuous resource theory (often called resource theory in short), which holds there is a continuous but finite resource to be divided among the memoranda (Bays & Husain, 2008; Ma et al., 2014).”
Alpha phase coding supports feature binding during working memory maintenance (2026, unknown): “…that disruptions in oscillatory phase should be associated with misbinding or ‘ swap ’ errors 26 , where an inaccurate response to the target item is accurate relative to a non-target item (e.g., if a subject is shown a red squareandabluecircleandmistakenlyreportsthecircle ’ scolorasred) 10,11 .”
Distinct functions for beta and alpha bursts in gating of human working memory (2023, background): “Working memory (WM) is a key cognitive component that allows us to hold and manipulate information online in our mind 1 – 5 .”
Prioritizing flexible working memory representations through retrospective attentional strengthening (2023, unknown): “Previous studies have claimed that low WM precision is related to spatial binding errors (Ma et al., 2014; Pertzov et al., 2012).”
Temporal expectation based on the duration variability modulates alpha oscillations during working memory retention (2022, background): “Extensive investigations in visual WM have characterised the neural basis of maintenance of visual representations (D'Esposito and Postle, 2015; Ma et al., 2014; Nobre, 2022) and isolated the patterns of neural activity that represent distinct functional states during the interval of retention (Mass”
Tracking neural correlates of prioritizing working memory representations through retrospective attentional strengthening (2022, background): “Previous studies have claimed that low WM precision is related to spatial binding 17 errors (47,48).”