ReviewAnnual review of vision science2021
Balancing Flexibility and Interference in Working Memory.
Review in Annual review of vision science, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Back in time: Reversed speech as a window into cognitive language processing-A systematic review.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Pooled it
- Comparative effectiveness of various physical exercise interventions on executive functions and related symptoms in children and adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: A systematic review and network meta-analysis.Frontiers in public health · 2023Pooled it
- Redundant prefrontal hemispheres adapt storage strategy to working memory demands.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Emotional Modulation of Working Memory in Older Adults: Dissociable Contributions of Cognitive Reserve and Emotional Intelligence.Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Human intracranial correlates of dynamic coding in auditory working memory.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- A multichannel MEG time-frequency analysis framework for detecting stage -specific effects of spatial distraction in visual-spatial working memory.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2026Article
- Cross-species evidence for the refinement of intrinsic neural timescales supporting executive system maturation through adolescence.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Sensory reformatting for a working visual memory.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2025Review
- Flexible Use of Limited Resources for Sequence Working Memory in Macaque Prefrontal Cortex.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Neuronal normalization in monkey MT is an intensity-weighted average.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The impact of category-based retro-cues on representational prioritization in visual working memory: behavioral and EEG evidence.Psychological research · 2025Article
- Near-random connections support top-down feature-based attentional modulations in early sensory cortex.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Neuronal normalization in monkey MT is an intensity-weighted average.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Modeling visual working memory using recurrent on-center off-surround neural network with distance dependent inhibition.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Task-Switch Related Reductions in Neural Distinctiveness in Children and Adults: Commonalities and Differences.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Non-Target Suppression Supports the Formation of Representational Prioritization Under High Working Memory Load.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Neuronal correlates of endogenous selective attention in the endbrain of crows.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Limits on selecting multiple items from working memory: the role of context and item competition.Frontiers in cognition · 2025Article
- Domain general frontoparietal regions show modality-dependent coding of auditory and visual rules.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
Abstract
Working memory is central to cognition, flexibly holding the variety of thoughts needed for complex behavior. Yet, despite its importance, working memory has a severely limited capacity, holding only three to four items at once. In this article, I review experimental and computational evidence that the flexibility and limited capacity of working memory reflect the same underlying neural mechanism. I argue that working memory relies on interactions between high-dimensional, integrative representations in the prefrontal cortex and structured representations in the sensory cortex. Together, these interactions allow working memory to flexibly maintain arbitrary representations. However, the distributed nature of working memory comes at the cost of causing interference between items in memory, resulting in a limited capacity. Finally, I discuss several mechanisms used by the brain to reduce interference and maximize the effective capacity of working memory.
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Registered trials
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.