Rapid forgetting results from competition over time between items in visual working memory.

Abstract

Working memory is now established as a fundamental cognitive process across a range of species. Loss of information held in working memory has the potential to disrupt many aspects of cognitive function. However, despite its significance, the mechanisms underlying rapid forgetting remain unclear, with intense recent debate as to whether it is interference between stored items that leads to loss of information or simply temporal decay. Here we show that both factors are essential and interact in a highly specific manner. Although a single item can be maintained in memory with high fidelity, multiple items compete in working memory, progressively degrading each other’s representations as time passes. Specifically, interaction between items is associated with both worsening precision and increased reporting errors of object features over time. Importantly, during the period of maintenance, although items are no longer visible, maintenance resources can be selectively redeployed to protect the probability to recall the correct feature and the precision with which cued items can be recalled, as if it was the only item in memory. These findings reveal that the biased competition concept could be applied not only to perceptual processes but also to active maintenance of working memory representations over time.

Selective control of working memory in prefrontal, parietal, and visual cortex

“…Next, we explored how selection impacts the neural representations of items in working memory. As noted above, selection improves working memory accuracy 5,[27][28][29] (Fig. 1E).…”

A Flexible Model of Working Memory

“…3E,F). This is consistent with behavioral studies that have shown increases in memory error, even below working memory capacity limits [Bays et al, 2009;Ma et al, 2014;Pertzov et al, 2017;Rademaker et al, 2018].…”

“…Consistent with behavioral studies [Bays et al, 2009;Ma et al, 2014;Pertzov et al, 2013Pertzov et al, , 2017Rademaker et al, 2018;Zhang and Luck, 2008], errors in working memory increased with the number of items held in memory ( Fig. 3C and S2A).…”

Unattended but actively stored: EEG dynamics reveal a dissociation between selective attention and storage in working memory

“…the proportion of valid to invalid retro-cue trials). Typically, studies that failed to observe invalid cueing costs used lower retrocue reliabilities 31,40,42 than studies that observed invalid cueing costs 32,37,39,43 . In a behavioral study, we observed invalid cueing costs only when the retro-cue had a high reliability (i.e., 80% valid), but not when it had a lower, but still above-chance reliability (i.e., 50% valid, with chance level being at 25% in both conditions).…”