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Changing concepts of working memory

Nature Neuroscience volume 17, pages 347–356 (2014)Cite this article

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Abstract

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.

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Figure 1: Evidence from delayed estimation challenging the slot model.
Figure 2: Models of working memory.
Figure 3: Neural correlates of storage in working memory.
Figure 4: Putative neural basis of set size effects in resource models of working memory.
Figure 5: Interpreting the shape and width of working memory error distributions.
Figure 6: Modes of failure in working memory retrieval.
Figure 7: Changing concepts of change detection.

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Acknowledgements

We thank R. van den Berg for useful discussions and assistance with Figure 5. W.J.M. is supported by award number R01EY020958 from the National Eye Institute and award number W911NF-12-1-0262 from the Army Research Office. P.M.B. and M.H. are supported by the Wellcome Trust.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Neural Science and Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, New York, USA

    Wei Ji Ma

  2. Department of Experimental Psychology and Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Masud Husain

  3. Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK

    Paul M Bays

  4. Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA

    Paul M Bays

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Correspondence to Wei Ji Ma.

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Ma, W., Husain, M. & Bays, P. Changing concepts of working memory. Nat Neurosci 17, 347–356 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3655

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