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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.

Original publication

DOI

10.1038/nn.3655

Type

Journal article

Journal

Nat Neurosci

Publication Date

03/2014

Volume

17

Pages

347 - 356

Keywords

Humans, Memory, Short-Term, Models, Theoretical