ArticlePsychological review2018
Chunking as a rational strategy for lossy data compression in visual working memory.
Article in Psychological review, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 52 papers.
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Who cites it
52 citing papers in PubMed.
- Compression as a neural mechanism of mnemonic chunking in prefrontal cortex.Current biology : CB · 2026Article
- Hippocampal skill memory expansion drives online performance dynamics during skill learning.Cell reports · 2026Article
- Redundant prefrontal hemispheres adapt storage strategy to working memory demands.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Skill Memory Expansion Shapes Micro-Scale Dynamics of Skill Learning.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Colors, characters, locations, and shapes: The capacity of working memory for multiple, dissimilar sets of items.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- A population vector model of visual working memory for real-world scenes.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2026Article
- A Population Vector Model of Visual Working Memory for Real-World Scenes.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Interplay between switching, inhibition, and mental attention: An exploratory eye-tracking study.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Using fMRI Representations of Single Objects to Predict Multiple Objects in Working Memory in Human Occipitotemporal and Posterior Parietal Cortices.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Chunking, Attraction, Repulsion, and Ensemble Effects Are Ubiquitous in Visual Working Memory.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Higher dopamine D1 receptor expression in prefrontal parvalbumin neurons underlies higher distractibility in marmosets versus macaques.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Assessing individual differences in grouping strategy in visual working memory.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- Article
- The Role of Event Number and Duration in Time-Compressed Memory Replay.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Adaptive chunking improves effective working memory capacity in a prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia circuit.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Can compression take place in working memory without a central contribution of long-term memory?Memory & cognition · 2024Article
- Proactive interference of visual working memory chunks implicates long-term memory.Memory & cognition · 2024Article
- Ordered spatial configuration protects representations of dissimilar items and reduces the similarity effect in visual working memory.Psychological research · 2024Article
- Visual working memory for natural scenes: challenges and opportunities.Cognitive processing · 2024Review
- Visual working memory models of delayed estimation do not generalize to whole-report tasks.Journal of vision · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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3 authors.
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Abstract
The nature of capacity limits for visual working memory has been the subject of an intense debate that has relied on models that assume items are encoded independently. Here we propose that instead, similar features are jointly encoded through a "chunking" process to optimize performance on visual working memory tasks. We show that such chunking can: (a) facilitate performance improvements for abstract capacity-limited systems, (b) be optimized through reinforcement, (c) be implemented by center-surround dynamics, and (d) increase effective storage capacity at the expense of recall precision. Human performance on a variant of a canonical working memory task demonstrated performance advantages, precision detriments, interitem dependencies, and trial-to-trial behavioral adjustments diagnostic of performance optimization through center-surround chunking. Models incorporating center-surround chunking provided a better quantitative description of human performance in our study as well as in a meta-analytic dataset, and apparent differences in working memory capacity across individuals were attributable to individual differences in the implementation of chunking. Our results reveal a normative rationale for center-surround connectivity in working memory circuitry, call for reevaluation of memory performance differences that have previously been attributed to differences in capacity, and support a more nuanced view of visual working memory capacity limitations: strategic tradeoff between storage capacity and memory precision through chunking contribute to flexible capacity limitations that include both discrete and continuous aspects. (PsycINFO Database Record
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