Working memory

Temporary retention and use of information for ongoing cognition and action. Its explanation must account for capacity, precision, interference, prioritization and updating. Persistent neural activity and activity-silent working memory describe candidate mechanisms or states rather than interchangeable definitions of the behavioral capacity.

Temporary maintenance and manipulation of information in service of an ongoing task. Retaining intermediate arithmetic results or integrating a sentence with earlier text can tax working memory. A simple immediate span and a task requiring storage plus processing need not measure the same demand. Improvements in structurally similar memory tests are not sufficient evidence for improved academic achievement.^[ref]

Replacing no-longer-relevant maintained information with currently relevant information. Working-memory updating must be distinguished operationally from simple maintenance and from manipulation without replacement.

A task requiring comparison of a current item with one presented a specified number of positions earlier. It combines maintenance, continuous replacement, comparison and response demands.

Retention through task-dependent network states without an uninterrupted, readily measurable content-specific activity pattern. Candidate mechanisms include temporary changes in synaptic efficacy. An absent decoding result is insufficient to establish silence, and perturbation-induced reactivation does not uniquely identify the underlying mechanism.

The hypothesis that sensory systems contribute representations used during retention, reusing feature-sensitive processing rather than requiring all memory content to reside in a separate abstract store. A decodable sensory pattern supports this idea without uniquely locating its maintenance mechanism.

Neural signals observed between encoding and a later memory-guided response. They may reflect retention, priority, anticipated action, time or control. Content-specific predictions and suitable task controls are needed before interpreting them as storage.

Temporary retention of sound-based or phonologically coded information. Articulatory rehearsal can support it, but demanding sentence processing also involves representations and computations beyond rehearsal.

Repeating a novel speech-like sequence. Performance jointly depends on auditory analysis, phonological retention and speech production, so it is not a pure test of any one of these components.

Refreshing information through overt or covert articulation. Concurrent speech can interfere with this process, providing a manipulation for testing its contribution to a task; changes in general task demands must also be considered.

The fidelity of a retained representation, assessed through the distribution of errors in continuous reports or a suitable behavioral model. Loss of precision is distinct from complete loss of an item; both can influence aggregate accuracy.

The amount of information that can be retained under specified task and measurement conditions. Behavioral estimates depend on stimulus complexity, interference and the assumed response model; a physiological plateau does not alone establish a universal fixed slot count.