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Making Room in Mind: How Familiarity Supports Working Memory| title | Making Room in Mind: How Familiarity Supports Working Memory |
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| start_date | 2026/03/04 |
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| schedule | 14h-15h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | Salle du Conseil, B31 & online |
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| summary | Humans have the remarkable ability to hold onto information – preserving it in working memory (WM) where it is ready for ongoing thought and action. This ability supports many essential activities, including following a conversation, driving, navigating, cooking from a recipe, and educational tasks such as reading comprehension and analytical problem solving. Although WM is undisputedly limited to storing only small amounts of information, it is clear that we can extend this capacity by capitalizing on existing knowledge in long-term memory (LTM). But how do we connect prior knowledge in LTM to benefit WM? Imagine you need to hold a phone number in mind: you recognize that it consists of a familiar chunk such as your birth year, and it immediately becomes easier to remember. Instead of holding each digit of the phone number in mind, you can strategically hold onto only the novel parts in WM and recruit LTM for the known parts. Although this is a well-established behavioral finding, theories diverge in the mechanism of connection between LTM and WM, and it is unclear how WM draws upon stored knowledge to improve capacity. In this talk, I will review multiple candidate mechanisms through which familiarity and prior knowledge enhance WM performance, highlighting how these interactions allow us to maintain more information and perform complex, goal-directed tasks more effectively. |
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| responsibles | Grégoire |
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Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
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| submitted | published | | 2026/02/23 14:01 UTC |
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