Changing concepts of working memory

Wei Ji Ma; Masud Husain; Paul M. Bays

doi:10.1038/nn.3655

Changing concepts of working memory

Wei Ji Ma, Masud Husain, Paul M. Bays

Research output: Contribution to journal › Review article › peer-review

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.

Original language	English (US)
Pages (from-to)	347-356
Number of pages	10
Journal	Nature Neuroscience
Volume	17
Issue number	3
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3655
State	Published - Mar 2014

ASJC Scopus subject areas

General Neuroscience

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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.",

author = "Ma, {Wei Ji} and Masud Husain and Bays, {Paul M.}",

note = "Funding Information: 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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N2 - 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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Changing concepts of working memory

Abstract

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