Working memory limits severely constrain long-term retention
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BRIEF REPORT
Working memory limits severely constrain long-term retention Alicia Forsberg 1 & Dominic Guitard 2 & Nelson Cowan 1 Accepted: 9 November 2020 # The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract There has been considerable controversy in recent years as to whether information held in working memory (WM) is rapidly forgotten or automatically transferred to long-term memory (LTM). Although visual WM capacity is very limited, we appear able to store a virtually infinite amount of information in visual LTM. Still, LTM retrieval often fails. Some view visual WM as a mental sketchpad that is wiped clean when new information enters, but not a consistent precursor of LTM. Others view the WM and LTM systems as inherently linked. Distinguishing between these possibilities has been difficult, as attempts to directly manipulate the active holding of information in visual WM has typically introduced various confounds. Here, we capitalized on the WM system’s capacity limitation to control the likelihood that visual information was actively held in WM. Our young-adult participants (N = 103) performed a WM task with unique everyday items, presented in groups of two, four, six, or eight items. Presentation time was adjusted according to the number of items. Subsequently, we tested participants’ LTM for items from the WM task. LTM was better for items presented originally within smaller WM set sizes, indicating that WM limitations contribute to subsequent LTM failures, and that holding items in WM enhances LTM encoding. Our results suggest that a limit in WM capacity contributes to an LTM encoding bottleneck for trial-unique familiar objects, with a relatively large effect size. Keywords Working memory . Visual memory . Long-term memory . Short-term memory
Introduction Working memory (WM) is a system for holding mental representations temporarily for use in thought and action (Cowan, 2017). A crucial feature of this system is its limit of three to four objects concurrently (Adam et al., 2017; Cowan, 2001). In contrast, we seem able to store unlimited information in long-term memory (LTM) (e.g., Brady et al., 2008). Still, a large proportion of the information we encounter is quickly forgotten. For instance, you might forget your colleague’s outfit despite recently seeing it in the hallway. This illustrates what we term the LTM-encoding bottleneck. Even if all of the information one encounters is somehow encoded into LTM,
* Alicia Forsberg [email protected] 1
Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri-Columbia, 210 McAlester Hall, Columbia, MO 65211-2500, USA
2
Faculte des Sciences de la Sante et des Services Communautaires, Department of Psychology, University of Moncton, Moncton, Canada
much of it is at least not encoded in a manner sufficient for later recognition. Here, we asked whether this bottleneck can be explained by WM limitations. How WM and LTM systems interact has implications for theories of memory, learning, and cognition. WM capacity is linked to fluid intelligence (Conway et
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