activated portion of the information in permanent memory, which extends beyond the focus of attention to include some automatically activated information (see Fig. 1). When researchers use the term 'working memory', some of them seem to be referring only to the focus of attention, whereas others seem to be referring to all of the temporarily activated information. It is also likely that certain...

A well-known characteristic of working memory (WM) is its limited capacity. The source of such limitations, however, is a continued point of debate. Developmental research is positioned to address this debate by jointly identifying the source(s) of limitations and the mechanism(s) underlying capacity increases. Here we provide a cross-domain survey of studies and theories of WM capacity develop...

Working memory capacity and fluid intelligence have been demonstrated to be strongly correlated traits. Typically, high working memory capacity is believed to facilitate reasoning through accurate maintenance of relevant information. In this article, we present a proposal reframing this issue, such that tests of working memory capacity and fluid intelligence are seen as measuring complementary ...

It has been proposed recently that a deficit in keeping track of spatial locations may contribute to the severity of unilateral neglect in some right hemisphere stroke patients. However, performance on traditional spatial working memory (SWM) tasks (e.g. Corsi blocks) might be confounded by failure to encode leftward locations, rather than a true deficit of maintaining locations in SWM. Here we...

The amount of information we can actively maintain 'in mind' is very limited. This capacity limitation, known as working memory (WM) capacity, has been of great interest because of its wide scope influence on the variety of intellectual abilities. Recently, there has been an ongoing debate about how this capacity should be best characterized. One viewpoint argues that WM capacity is allocated i...

Psychological studies indicate that human ability to keep information in readily accessible working memory is limited to four items for most people. This extremely low capacity severely limits execution of many cognitive tasks, but its neuronal underpinnings remain unclear. Here we show that in the framework of synaptic theory of working memory, capacity can be analytically estimated to scale w...

Recent studies have shown that past selection history affects the allocation of attention on target selection. However, it is unclear whether context-driven selection history can modulate the efficacy of attention allocation on working memory (WM) representations. This study tests the influences of selection history on WM capacity. A display of one item (low load) or three/four items (high load...

If, as many psychologists seem to believe, im­ mediate memory represents a distinct system or set of processes from long-term memory (L TM), then what might· it be for? This fundamental, functional question was surprisingly unanswer­ able in the 1970s, given the volume of research that had explored short-term memory (STM), and given the ostensible role that STM was thought to play in cognitive ...

As the United States mobilized for the war in Europe a century ago, its Army faced a formidable challenge at home : how to efficiently and effectively assess the mental abilities of millions of prospective recruits ? The solution to this problem, in the form of the group-administered cognitive ability test, would not only revolutionize military personnel selection, but subsequently also applica...