ArticleScientific reports2018
Strategic allocation of working memory resource.
Article in Scientific reports, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers.
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Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed.
- Penny for your thoughts: A review and proposed model of socioeconomic status, working memory and worry.The British journal of developmental psychology · 2026Review
- Intrinsic rewards guide visual resource allocation via reinforcement learning.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Visual confidence accurately tracks increasing internal noise with eccentricity in peripheral vision.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Implicit adaptation's effect on sensorimotor and motor confidence.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Visual working memory prioritization modulates serial dependence beyond simple attentional effects.BMC biology · 2025Article
- Sensorimotor confidence during explicit motor adaptation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Semantic relationships among objects reduce the attention required for inter-item binding in working memory.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- The geometry of efficient codes: How rate-distortion trade-offs distort the latent representations of generative models.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Neural mechanisms of resource allocation in working memory.Science advances · 2025Article
- Prioritizing Working Memory Resources Depends on the Prefrontal Cortex.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Low-priority items are held in visual working memory: Evidence from flexible allocation in a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) paradigm.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Prioritizing working memory resources depends on prefrontal cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Representation and computation in visual working memory.Nature human behaviour · 2024Review
- Optimal Selection of Sampling Points within Sewer Networks for Wastewater-Based Epidemiology Applications.Methods and protocols · 2024Article
- Functional brain connectivity predicts sleep duration in youth and adults.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- Metacognitive bias resulting from trade-off between local and global motion signals.Journal of vision · 2023Article
- Article
- Awareness of the relative quality of spatial working memory representations.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2023Article
- Feeling lucky? Prospective and retrospective cues for sensorimotor confidence.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Predicted utility modulates working memory fidelity in the brain.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Visual working memory (VWM), the brief retention of past visual information, supports a range of cognitive functions. One of the defining, and largely studied, characteristics of VWM is how resource-limited it is, raising questions about how this resource is shared or split across memoranda. Since objects are rarely equally important in the real world, we ask how people split this resource in settings where objects have different levels of importance. In a psychophysical experiment, participants remembered the location of four targets with different probabilities of being tested after a delay. We then measured their memory accuracy of one of the targets. We found that participants allocated more resource to memoranda with higher priority, but underallocated resource to high- and overallocated to low-priority targets relative to the true probability of being tested. These results are well explained by a computational model in which resource is allocated to minimize expected estimation error. We replicated this finding in a second experiment in which participants bet on their memory fidelity after making the location estimate. The results of this experiment show that people have access to and utilize the quality of their memory when making decisions. Furthermore, people again allocate resource in a way that minimizes memory errors, even in a context in which an alternative strategy was incentivized. Our study not only shows that people are allocating resource according to behavioral relevance, but suggests that they are doing so with the aim of maximizing memory accuracy.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.