Recent trends in the cognitive neuroscience of working memory

The Cognitive Neuroscience of Working Memory (CNWM) is an edited volume, inspired by The Second International Conference on Working Memory, which took place in Kyoto, Japan in the summer of 2004. Each of the invited speakers was invited to contribute a chapter for the volume. The upside of this approach is that the book provides the reader with a broad sampling of state-of-the-art research in the field of working memory. The downside is that the volume lacks an overarching set of goals, and many of the chapters are not devoted to the cognitive neuroscience of WM. Yet, despite a lack of coherence, the book succeeds in capturing a number of important themes that are driving contemporary research on WM. The purpose of this review is to highlight some of these themes, and in so doing, to provide a selective overview of the contemporary landscape of WM research. We will also discuss recent computational modelling approaches to WM, which unfortunately were not addressed by the Osaka et al. volume. Some of the most enjoyable passages in CNWM come from the introductory chapter by Baddeley and Hitch. What makes this chapter special is that Baddeley and Hitch provide an autobiographical account of the circumstances that led to their seminal 1974 chapter on WM. We learn that Baddeley and Hitch came together at Cambridge in 1971 to work on a grant devoted to exploring the relationship between shortand long-term memory (STM and LTM), at a time when the field had largely tired of the topic of STM, and instead had turned to the transfer of information to LTM (e.g., Craik and Lockhart, 1972) and to the organisation of LTM (Collins and Quillian, 1969; Tulving, 1972). At the same time, however, neuropsychological data had demonstrated that patients with severe STM deficits could function normally in everyday life and in many important cognitive activities (Shallice and Warrington, 1970). These data called into question most contemporary models, which assumed that STM served as an essential gateway to the information-processing stream, and re-invigorated Baddeley and Hitch, leading them to investigate the function of STM, i.e., the role that temporary storage might play in higher-order cognition. It is for this reason that they named their construct working memory. While the opening chapter is a pleasure to read, one cannot help but notice that most of the subsequent chapters do not embrace the Baddeley model (in fact, some provide a compelling account for its demise; see Marklund and Nyberg, Chapter 18; Postle, Chapter 19). Indeed, the first theme we discuss below is the historical transition from multi-store models of WM to more dynamic, functional approaches. The Osaka et al. volume demonstrates that this transition may be nearly over – many contemporary researchers of WM no longer use the Baddeley model as a framework (but for a dissenting view, see Baddeley, 2007). They choose, instead, to think of WM as the active portion of LTM, coupled with mechanisms for cognitive control. It is, perhaps, ironic that neuroscience data (e.g., Shallice and Warrington, 1970) largely motivated the original Baddeley and Hitch model, yet as we learn later in the volume, such data are currently providing the greatest challenges to the model (e.g., Postle, 2006). Our review of CNWM will forego a detailed discussion of each individual chapter. Instead, we will focus on a few broad themes that we see running through the volume, and discuss how they correspond to contemporary research in WM, as we see it. Our apologies in advance to the authors of chapters that receive less attention in this review; we do not mean to diminish the contribution of these authors as each chapter is worth the reader’s attention; some chapters simply fit the themes we extracted better than others.