ArticleeLife2025
Adaptive chunking improves effective working memory capacity in a prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia circuit.
Article in eLife, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Orbitofrontal-sensory cortical interactions in learning and adaptive decision-making.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2026Review
- Model-Based Electroencephalography Phenotyping Uncovers Distinct Neurocomputational Mechanisms Underlying Learning Impairments Across Psychopathologies.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2026Article
- Interplay between switching, inhibition, and mental attention: An exploratory eye-tracking study.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Comparative Evaluation of Advanced Chunking for Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Large Language Models for Clinical Decision Support.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
How and why is working memory (WM) capacity limited? Traditional cognitive accounts focus either on limitations on the number or items that can be stored (slots models), or loss of precision with increasing load (resource models). Here, we show that a neural network model of prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia can learn to reuse the same prefrontal populations to store multiple items, leading to resource-like constraints within a slot-like system, and inducing a trade-off between quantity and precision of information. Such 'chunking' strategies are adapted as a function of reinforcement learning and WM task demands, mimicking human performance and normative models. Moreover, adaptive performance requires a dynamic range of dopaminergic signals to adjust striatal gating policies, providing a new interpretation of WM difficulties in patient populations such as Parkinson's disease, ADHD, and schizophrenia. These simulations also suggest a computational rather than anatomical limit to WM capacity.
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