The CEU Department of Cognitive Science cordially invites you to its talk
by:
Dr. *Ansgar Endress *(City University of London)
[web <http://www.endress.org/>]
Title: *Interference and memory capacity limitations*
Date: Wednesday, 3 July 2019
Time: 17:00-18:30
Location: Department of Cognitive Science, CEU, Oktober 6 st. 7, room 10
Abstract:
Working Memory (WM) retains items over brief periods of time for use by
ongoing cognitive operations. WM capacity is thought to be limited to 3 or
4 items. Further, such capacity limitations are often thought to reflect
limitations of active maintenance mechanisms such as attention and
executive function.
Here, I suggest that such severe capacity-limitations mostly arise in
experiments with substantial proactive interference (PI) among items, and
that these limitations disappear when interference among items is reduced.
Further, I provide a simple mathematical proof showing that, under general
conditions, interference among memory items guarantees fixed and limited
capacity limitations even in the absence of the maintenance mechanisms that
are supposedly at the root of WM capacity limitations. Interference can
also mimic the predictions of different theories of WM, notably those of
slot-like and continuous resource-like theories. As a result, neither the
existence of WM limitations nor their shape are necessarily diagnostic of
the memory mechanisms causing these limitations. Instead, at least in some
situations, WM limitations might be largely automatic consequences of
interference.
In line with this view, I show that the effects of interference on memory
performance are relatively independent of presentation speed and executive
secondary tasks, and that the forms of attention that supposedly yield
capacity limitations of 3 or 4 items – simultaneous attention as measured
by multiple object tracking – have fundamentally different properties from
WM.
Based on these and other experiments, I propose that, in many situations,
the primary limitation of memory might be to retrieve relevant rather than
irrelevant memory representations, and that this problem might be
exacerbated if “crowding” of the memory space makes it hard to identify the
appropriate memory items.
We are looking forward to see you.
Cognitive Science Events at CEU:
http://cognitivescience.ceu.hu/events
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