title: Changing concepts of working memory.
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.
authors.affiliation: Center for Neural Science and Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, New York, USA.
authors.forename: Wei Ji
authors.initials: WJ
authors.lastname: Ma
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Psychology and Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
authors.forename: Masud
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Husain
authors.affiliation: 1] Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK. [2] Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA.
authors.forename: Paul M
authors.initials: PM
authors.lastname: Bays
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D008962:Models, Theoretical