Getting value out of working memory through strategic prioritisation: Implications for storage and control

Allen, Richard J.; Atkinson, Amy Louise; Hitch, Graham J. · 2024 · Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

DOI: 10.1177/17470218241258102

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Summary

This review paper examines how strategic prioritization, driven by assigned value or reward, influences working memory storage and control. Motivated by the capacity-limited nature of working memory and its critical role in complex cognition, the authors investigate how attentional resources can be flexibly allocated to enhance performance for high-value items. The review synthesizes research from the last decade, primarily focusing on visual working memory paradigms with young adults, while also exploring extensions to other modalities and populations. The authors analyze experimental designs where participants are assigned differential point values or rewards for specific items within a memorized set, without these values predicting test frequency. This method encourages strategic prioritization rather than relying on predictive cues. The review covers various task contexts, including sequential and simultaneous presentation of stimuli, and employs different response measures such as cued recall, continuous reproduction, and recognition. Additionally, the paper explores the generalizability of these effects across visual, auditory-verbal, tactile, and olfactory domains, as well as the interaction between value-driven prioritization and executive load or perceptual interference. Key findings indicate that assigning higher value to specific items significantly improves memory accuracy for those items, often at the expense of lower-value items. However, this trade-off results in no overall change in total working memory capacity or performance levels compared to equal-value conditions. A consistent recency advantage persists regardless of value allocation, suggesting an automatic component to serial position effects. Value-directed prioritization is effortful and under top-down strategic control, operating during encoding, maintenance, and retrieval. The effects are robust across visual, auditory, and tactile modalities, though they may be less pronounced in olfactory tasks. Importantly, prioritized high-value items are not immune to interference; in some contexts, they show increased vulnerability to perceptual distractors, such as suffix stimuli, compared to low-value items. Executive load can also diminish the magnitude of value effects, particularly in visuospatial tasks, highlighting the reliance on central executive resources. The significance of this research lies in demonstrating that working memory is not a static storage system but a dynamic interface where attentional resources are strategically shifted based on value. This challenges the notion that value increases capacity, instead showing it reallocates limited resources. The findings have implications for understanding the interplay between attention, working memory, and strategic control, suggesting that optimal performance depends on flexible resource allocation. The review also points to future directions, including mapping how task context features influence these processes and exploring applications for improving working memory efficiency in practical settings.

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• working memory