Allocation of Visual Working Memory
How the brain distributes a limited working-memory resource across competing visual items — research internship under Dr Paul Bays.
- University of Cambridge
- Summer 2023
- Research intern, Department of Psychology
- Completed
The question
Working memory is sharply limited. When several things must be held in mind at once, the precision of each memory degrades — but not uniformly. How does the brain allocate its finite memory resource across competing items, and what governs which items are remembered well and which are sacrificed?
Approach
Working in Dr Paul Bays’ group at Cambridge, the project drew on the resource model of working memory, in which memory is a continuous quantity divided among items rather than a fixed number of discrete slots. Behavioural psychophysics — precise report tasks across varying set sizes — probes how recall precision scales as more is asked of the system.
Why it matters
The allocation of a scarce internal resource is a problem the brain solves constantly, and it connects directly to the larger thread running through this research: learning and memory as dynamical, resource-bounded inference rather than passive storage.