Mental Objects in Working Memory

Abstract

Working memory is the small amount of information that we hold in mind and use to carry out cognitive processes such as language comprehension and production, problem-solving, and decision-making. In order to understand cognitive development, it would be helpful to know whether working memory increases in capacity with development and, if so, how and why. I will focus on two major stumbling blocks toward understanding working memory development, namely that (1) many potentially relevant aspects of the mind change in parallel during development, obscuring the role of any one change; and (2) one cannot use the same test procedure from infancy to adulthood, complicating comparisons across age groups. With regard to the first stumbling block, the parallel development of different aspects of the mind, we discuss research in which attempts were made to hold constant some factors (knowledge, strategies, direction of attention) to investigate whether developmental differences remain. With regard to the second stumbling block, procedural differences in tests at different age groups, I suggest ways in which the results might be reconciled across procedures. I highlight the value of pursuing research that could distinguish between two different key hypotheses that emerge: that there is a developmental increase in the number of working memory slots (or in a basic resource that holds items in working memory), and that there is a developmental increase in the amount of detail that each of these slots can hold.

On some statistical and cerebral aspects of the limits of Working Memory capacity in Anthropoid Primates, with particular reference to Pan and Homo, and their significance for Human Evolution

“…Manrique et al humans (aged 25 to 80) showed associations between white-matter-WM over multiple white-matter tracts, which reinforces the idea of WM being a widely distributed resource (Christophel et al, 2017), one requiring dynamic agile communication across multiple brain regions. Cowan (2017) suggests that measuring working memory during child development from infancy through childhood is complicated by two aspects of working memory that develop differently. One is the number of files that provide the storage location for the information inserted into temporary memory.…”

How sublexical association strength modulates updating: Cognitive and strategic effects

“…Previous studies have mainly focused on the simple task of recall, which entails temporary maintenance of information in WM (see also Cowan, 2017). Here, we focused instead on the interaction between LTM and updating, a complex WM function that comprises not only temporary maintenance of information but also item substitution (see Ecker et al, 2010).…”

Corvids optimize working memory by categorizing continuous stimuli

“…This categorization allows generalization across various sensory inputs that require the same behavioral response 6,7 , which is essential in our detailed and sensory rich environment 8,9 . However, grouping of information to reduce WM content also introduces additional sensory biases and inevitably reduces the precision of memory representations 10,11 (e.g., leading to a confusion of umbrellas differing only in their exact shade of blue).…”