The Capacity Limit of Working Memory

Working memory is a system that holds information available for processing – corresponding to the current contents of conscious awareness. It has a severely limited capacity. We study the causes of that capacity limit. In particular, we ask whether working memory capacity is limited by decay of memory representations over time (probably not), whether it reflects a limited mental resource (maybe), and to what extent it arises from interference between multiple representations that we try to hold available simultaneously (probably to a large degree).