Towards a Theory of Working Memory
Klaus Oberauer
Abstract
Working memory provides a medium for building and manipulating new representations that control our thoughts and actions. To fulfil this function, a working memory system needs to meet six requirements: (1) it must have a mechanism for rapidly forming temporary bindings to combine elements into new structures; (2) it needs a focus of attention for selectively accessing individual elements for processing; (3) it must hold both declarative representations of what is the case, and procedural representations of how to act on the current situation; (4) it needs a process for rapid updating, including rapid removal of outdated contents. Moreover, contents of working memory (5) need to be shielded from interference from long-term memory, while (6) working memory should be able to use information in long-term memory when it is useful. This chapter summarizes evidence in support of these mechanisms and processes. It presents three computational models that each implement some of these mechanisms, and explains different subsets of empirical findings about working memory: the SOB-CS model accounts for behaviour in tests of immediate serial recall, including complex-span tasks. The interference model explains data from a common test of visual working memory, the continuous-reproduction task. The set-selection model explains how people learn memory sets and task sets, how these sets are retrieved from long-term memory, and how these mechanisms enable switching between memory sets and task sets.