The impact of storage on processing: How is information maintained in working memory?

Vergauwe, Evie; Camos, Valérie; Barrouillet, Pierre

doi:10.1037/a0035779

Cited by 114 publications

(273 citation statements)

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“…tasks recruited the right IFJ and that only the verbal task additionally recruited the left IFJ on top of that. This specific pattern is reminiscent of the recently observed behavioral asymmetry between the maintenance of verbal and spatial information suggesting that while spatial information can solely rely on domain-general attentional maintenance, verbal information can also rely on a domain-specific maintenance mechanism independent from attention (Vergauwe et al, 2014). It might be possible that the right IFJ is involved in domain-general rapid switching of attention between processing and storage and is thus revealed in both tasks, whereas the left IFJ might be more closely related to verbal WM.…”

Section: The Nature Of Wm Resources: Domain-general Time-based Resourmentioning

confidence: 53%

Domain-general involvement of the posterior frontolateral cortex in time-based resource-sharing in working memory: An fMRI study

et al. 2015

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Working memory is often defined in cognitive psychology as a system devoted to the simultaneous processing and maintenance of information. In line with the time-based resource-sharing model of working memory (TBRS; Barrouillet and Camos, 2015;Barrouillet et al., 2004), there is accumulating evidence that, when memory items have to be maintained while performing a concurrent activity, memory performance depends on the cognitive load of this activity, independently of the domain involved. The present study used fMRI to identify regions in the brain that are sensitive to variations in cognitive load in a domain-general way. More precisely, we aimed at identifying brain areas that activate during maintenance of memory items as a direct function of the cognitive load induced by both verbal and spatial concurrent tasks. Results show that the right IFJ and bilateral SPL/IPS are the only areas showing an increased involvement as cognitive load increases and do so in a domain general manner. When correlating the fMRI signal with the approximated cognitive load as defined by the TBRS model, it was shown that the main focus of the cognitive load-related activation is located in the right IFJ. The present findings indicate that the IFJ makes domain-general contributions to time-based resource-sharing in working memory and allowed us to generate the novel hypothesis by which the IFJ might be the neural basis for the process of rapid switching. We argue that the IFJ might be a crucial part of a central attentional bottleneck in the brain because of its inability to upload more than one task rule at once. © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. IntroductionThe ability of storing information, while doing something else, is one of the core abilities of the human mind making it possible for humans to flexibly adapt to an ever-changing environment. In cognitive psychology, the limited-capacity system underpinning human's ability to mentally maintain information in an active and accessible state, while concurrently and selectively processing some additional information, is referred to as working memory (WM; Baddeley and Hitch, 1974). A model of WM that has focused explicitly on the dual functioning of WM, i.e., the combination of processing and storage, is the time-based resource-sharing model (TBRS; Barrouillet et al., 2004Barrouillet et al., , 2007Barrouillet et al., , 2011. According to this model, the dual functioning of WM is achieved through a mechanism of time-based sharing of domain-general resources between processing and storage. The model assumes that processing and storage both require attention which constitutes a pool of limited domain-general resources that needs to be shared (see also Egner, 2014a, 2014b, for a similar assumption). When attention is focused on the memory traces of to-be-recalled information, they receive activation, but this activation decays over time as soon as the focus of attention is switched away (Cowan, 1995(Cowan, , 1999Towse and Hitch, 1995). Their complete loss would be avoided by a rap...

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Section: The Nature Of Wm Resources: Domain-general Time-based Resourmentioning

confidence: 53%

Domain-general involvement of the posterior frontolateral cortex in time-based resource-sharing in working memory: An fMRI study

et al. 2015

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“…We do not claim, however, that attention is not involved in memorizations, and there is a wealth of evidence showing that attention (or at least active processing) is used in memorization, starting with the levels of processing theory (see, among many others, e.g., Chen & Cowan, 2009;Craik & Lockhart, 1972;Lepsien & Nobre, 2007;Majerus et al, 2014;Morey & Bieler, 2013;Vergauwe et al, 2014).…”

Section: Goals and Limitations Of The Current Proofsmentioning

confidence: 96%

Interference and memory capacity limitations.

Endress

Szabó

2017

Psychological Review

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This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. However, the origins of these capacity limitations are debated, and generally attributed to active, attentional processes. Here, we show that the existence of interference among items in memory mathematically guarantees fixed and limited capacity limits under very general conditions, irrespective of any processing assumptions. Assuming that interference (i) increases with the number of interfering items and (ii) brings memory performance to chance levels for large numbers of interfering items, capacity limits are a simple function of the relative influence of memorization and interference. In contrast, we show that time-based memory limitations do not lead to fixed memory capacity limitations that are independent of the timing properties of an experiment. We show that interference can mimic both slot-like and continuous resource-like memory limitations, suggesting that these types of memory performance might not be as different as commonly believed. We speculate that slot-like WM limitations might arise from crowding-like phenomena in memory when participants have to retrieve items. Further, based on earlier research on parallel attention and enumeration, we suggest that crowding-like phenomena might be a common reason for the three major cognitive capacity limitations. As suggested by Miller (1956) and Cowan (2001), these capacity limitations might thus arise due to a common reason, even though they likely rely on distinct processes. Permanent repository link:

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“…In contrast, there is no established method for measuring the duration of refreshing. Vergauwe, Camos, and Barrouillet (2014) proposed a refreshing rate of 50 ms per item.…”

Section: Decaymentioning

confidence: 99%

What limits working memory capacity?

Oberauer

Farrell

Jarrold

et al. 2016

Psychological Bulletin

252

213

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We review the evidence for the three principal theoretical contenders that vie to explain why and how working memory capacity is limited. We examine the possibility that capacity limitations arise from temporal decay; we examine whether they might reflect a limitation in cognitive resources; and we ask whether capacity might be limited because of mutual interference of representations in working memory. We evaluate each hypothesis against a common set of findings reflecting the capacity limit: The set-size effect and its modulation by domain-specificity and heterogeneity of the memory set; the effects of unfilled retention intervals and of distractor processing in the retention interval; and the pattern of correlates of working-memory tests. We conclude that---at least for verbal memoranda---a decay explanation is untenable. A resource-based view remains tenable but has difficulty accommodating several findings. The interference approach has its own set of difficulties but accounts best for the set of findings, and therefore appears to present the most promising approach for future development.Keywords: working memory, decay, resources, interference, individual differences WM Capacity 3 What Limits Working Memory Capacity?Working memory (WM) is the system that holds mental representations available for processing. Its limited capacity is a limiting factor for the complexity of our thoughts (Halford, Cowan, & Andrews, 2007;Oberauer, 2009). Measures of WM capacity have been identified as major determinants of cognitive development in childhood (Bayliss, Jarrold, Gunn, & Baddeley, 2003) and in old age (Park et al., 2002;Salthouse, 1994), as well as of individual differences in intellectual abilities (Conway, Kane, & Engle, 2003;Jarrold & Towse, 2006). Understanding why WM capacity is limited is therefore an essential step toward understanding why human cognitive abilities are limited, why individuals differ in these abilities, and how abilities develop over the lifespan.In this article we use the term WM capacity in a descriptive sense, referring to the fact that people can hold only a limited amount of mental content available for processing. The capacity limit is usually operationalized as a limit on how much new information people can remember over short periods of time (in the order of seconds), but there are reasons to believe (discussed below) that the capacity limit also applies to people's ability to make information in the current environment simultaneously available for processing.Hypotheses about what limits WM capacity can be organized into three groups: (1) Some theories assume that representations in WM decay over time, unless decay is prevented by some form of restoration process such as rehearsal. According to this view, WM has limited capacity because only a limited amount of information can be rehearsed before it fades away into an irrecoverable state (Baddeley, Thomson, & Buchanan, 1975;Schweickert & Boruff, 1986). (2) Alternatively, WM capacity has been characterized as a limited resourc...

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The impact of storage on processing: How is information maintained in working memory?

Cited by 114 publications

References 79 publications

Domain-general involvement of the posterior frontolateral cortex in time-based resource-sharing in working memory: An fMRI study

Domain-general involvement of the posterior frontolateral cortex in time-based resource-sharing in working memory: An fMRI study

Interference and memory capacity limitations.

What limits working memory capacity?

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