Abstract
Working memory (WM) is a goal-directed memory system that actively maintains a limited amount of task-relevant information to serve the current goal. By this definition, WM maintenance should be terminated after the goal is accomplished, spontaneously removing no-longer-relevant information from WM. Past studies have failed to provide direct evidence of spontaneous removal of WM content by allowing participants to engage in a strategic reallocation of WM resources to competing information within WM. By contrast, we provide direct neural and behavioral evidence that visual WM content can be largely removed less than 1 s after it becomes obsolete, in the absence of a strategic allocation of resources (total N = 442 adults). These results demonstrate that visual WM is intrinsically a goal-directed system, and spontaneous removal provides a means for capacity-limited WM to keep up with ever-changing demands in a dynamic environment.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
