Throughout most of my career, I think I was aware that there was some issue with the definition of working memory (WM), in that many psychological researchers often seemed to confuse the term WM with the multicomponent model of it that was proposed by Baddeley and Hitch in 1974. I started to go on a […]
Digital Event
In his recent article in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review that stimulated this digital event, Nelson Cowan undertakes the impressive endeavor to disentangle the various definitions of working memory (WM) that have been around in the literature since the term WM was coined. He does so to counter the confusion that the use of different […]
I was sitting in the audience, listening to a symposium speaker field questions, when someone asked about working memory. “Working memory? Does anyone actually believe in that anymore?” was the speaker’s reply, and from the inside of my narrowly-focused scientific bubble, it astonished me. I had only recently taken up my first tenure-track position as […]
Nelson Cowan’s review of definitions of “working memory” provides a very useful overview of the different ways in which the term has been and is still being used in the literature, and the potential confusion that can be caused by its multi-faceted meaning. Cowan identified nine definitions spanning multiple disciplines and several decades of research, […]
Type “working memory” into Google Scholar and you get nearly 2,000,000 results. Topping the list is the paper “working memory” by Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch, which has been cited more than 12,000 times since its publication in 1974. The Web of Science search engine is slightly more modest, with around 54,000 scientific publications being […]
How are the meanings of words, events and objects represented and organized in the brain? When we think of a dog, what representation are we invoking? Is there such thing as an abstract dogness—the doggiest of all dogs—or do we merely remember one of many stored exemplars of dogs that we have encountered in our lives? (If […]
Until a few weeks ago, I didn’t know what it meant to go berserk. Or, more accurately, I didn’t know what it really meant to go berserk. I was used to examples like this (thanks, COCA!): “My God. It’s like the Richmond Botanical Gardens gone berserk. I’ve never seen plants this big.” “Annie hadn’t given him a goodbye today, […]
The #symbodiment special issue of the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review empaneling “Arguments about the nature of concepts” embodies much that is salutary about our field—vigorous, sometimes heated, criticism of recent creative attempts to ground cognition. How symbols are grounded to their worldly referents has long been recognized as a central problem for psychology by scholars such as Harnad and Skinner. The […]
How are the meanings of words, events, and objects represented and organized in the brain? This question, perhaps more than any other in the field, probes some of the deepest and most foundational puzzles regarding the structure of the mind and brain. …so begins Mahon and Hickok’s introduction to this collection of papers “on issues of fundamental significance to […]
The special issue of Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, in conjunction with the digital #symbodiment event, represents an effort to take stock of the “embodiment vs. symbols” debate that has garnered an increasing amount of attention in the field. In this commentary, I present a few thoughts about the successes and failures of the embodied research program, and offer some thoughts on the road forward. […]