Cog Sci Event on Working Memory: Friday Jan 20th, 3:30 p.m.

Hi all--

   For any of you that might be interested, I wanted to announce this event on the linguistic aspects of 'working memory,' the cognitive faculty that lets us hold information on back-burner while processing something else. It's this Friday at 3:30 in the Psych building.  I'll be there; feel free to join me...

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Cognitive Forum on January 20th by Jonathan Hakun

Dear Psychology and Cognitive Science Colleagues,

Please join us for Cognitive Science Forum on Friday, January 20th at 3:30 pm in Psychology 230.  Jonathan Hakun will be presenting "Working Memory Capacity: An Unhealthy Obsession with Size."

Abstract: Working memory, during every step of its conceptual evolution from a short-term-store to a processing platform, has been described as a limited-capacity system.  However, despite nearly 60 years of empirical development, the units of measurement used to describe the capacity of the system have remained a controversy to this day.  While theoretical contributions from the verbal domain have moved the argument beyond a description of the number of items that can be maintained over a short delay, in favor of an attention-based maintenence mechanism, research in the visual domain has held tightly to the discrete unit/slot hypothesis (i.e. how many items can be maintained).  In my talk, I'll review the visual working memory literature and discuss the source of controversy over this strong hypothesis.  By presenting my own data in the context of current theoretical models I hope to lay the groundwork for a future multi-modal investigation into the mechanisms that circumscribe the capacity of working memory.