TY - JOUR
T1 - Flexible cognitive resources
T2 - Competitive content maps for attention and memory
AU - Franconeri, Steven L.
AU - Alvarez, George A.
AU - Cavanagh, Patrick
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by an NSF CAREER Grant BCS-1056730 to S.F., NSF SLC Grant SBE-1041707, the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC), and an NSF CAREER Grant BCS-0953730 to G.A.A., and by NIH EY09258 and Chaire d’Excellence grants to P.C. We thank Doug Bemis, Brandon Liverence, Audrey Lustig, and Yangqing Xu for comments, and Kevin Hartstein for his assistance in manuscript preparation.
PY - 2013/3
Y1 - 2013/3
N2 - The brain has finite processing resources so that, as tasks become harder, performance degrades. Where do the limits on these resources come from? We focus on a variety of capacity-limited buffers related to attention, recognition, and memory that we claim have a two-dimensional 'map' architecture, where individual items compete for cortical real estate. This competitive format leads to capacity limits that are flexible, set by the nature of the content and their locations within an anatomically delimited space. We contrast this format with the standard 'slot' architecture and its fixed capacity. Using visual spatial attention and visual short-term memory as case studies, we suggest that competitive maps are a concrete and plausible architecture that limits cognitive capacity across many domains.
AB - The brain has finite processing resources so that, as tasks become harder, performance degrades. Where do the limits on these resources come from? We focus on a variety of capacity-limited buffers related to attention, recognition, and memory that we claim have a two-dimensional 'map' architecture, where individual items compete for cortical real estate. This competitive format leads to capacity limits that are flexible, set by the nature of the content and their locations within an anatomically delimited space. We contrast this format with the standard 'slot' architecture and its fixed capacity. Using visual spatial attention and visual short-term memory as case studies, we suggest that competitive maps are a concrete and plausible architecture that limits cognitive capacity across many domains.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.tics.2013.01.010
DO - 10.1016/j.tics.2013.01.010
M3 - Review article
C2 - 23428935
AN - SCOPUS:84875273398
SN - 1364-6613
VL - 17
SP - 134
EP - 141
JO - Trends in Cognitive Sciences
JF - Trends in Cognitive Sciences
IS - 3
ER -