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Working memory is not a natural kind and cannot explain central cognition

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Abstract

Working memory is a foundational construct of cognitive psychology, where it is thought to be a capacity that enables us to keep information in mind and to use that information to support goal directed behavior. Philosophers have recently employed working memory to explain central cognitive processes, from consciousness to reasoning. In this paper, I show that working memory cannot meet even a minimal account of natural kindhood, as the functions of maintenance and manipulation of information that tie working memory models and theories together do not have a coherent or univocal realizer in the brain. As such, working memory cannot explain central cognition. Rather, I argue that working memory merely redescribes its target phenomenon, and in doing so it obfuscates relevant distinctions amongst the many ways that brains like ours retain and transform information in the service of cognition. While this project ultimately erodes the explanatory role that working memory has played in our understanding of cognition, it simultaneously prompts us to evaluate the function of natural kinds within cognitive science, and signals the need for a productive pessimism to frame our future study of cognitive categories.

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Notes

  1. As a cursory gloss, both of these projects aim to identify fundamental properties characteristic of thought, where Fodor’s isotropy describes the possibility that the content of any one thought might be relevant to any other, and Evan’s constraint details how any number of properties might be predicated to any object of thought. As Carruthers (2014) makes explicit, the possible multiplicity of relations that thoughts and their properties can bear to one other can be captured by the structure of a multimodal mental workspace, which he identifies as working memory (144). Thanks to a reviewer for prompting this clarification.

  2. This is, of course, only a subset of positions in the philosophical literature that plausibly rely on features predicated of working memory. As an anonymous reviewer has pointed out, scholars who use the notion of a “specious presence” or a “circuit of consciousness” may be reliant on something that more closely resembles the modern psychological formulation of working memory (e.g., Ladd 1887; James 1890; Husserl 1964; Bergson 1990), and, reviewing this correspondence is merited in future work. However, by focusing on the authors above, we can showcase the breath of possible theories that make use of a unified, domain-general mental workspace that enables flexible thought. Finally, while it seems odd to suggest that Aristotle employs something like working memory in his description of the phantasia, the connection and striking parallels between the two concepts merits considered exploration, as both are said to retain perceptual information, are crucial to the process of long-term memory formation, and integral to every instance of deliberative thought.

  3. Cf. Carruthers’ (chp. 8, 2015) excellent review of avian proception, and Godfrey-Smith’s compelling account of cephalopod intelligence (2016).

  4. Although whether a robust homeostasis, such as an equilibrium, is a necessary feature of HPC natural kinds has been debated (cf. Craver 2009).

  5. Both surveys naturally tend to favor Cowan’s own “generic” or “long-term working memory” view.

  6. Here, I am following in the rhetorical footsteps of Michaelian (2011) who arguably had a more difficult task in charitably characterizing most other types of memory using the template of the multiple memory systems hypothesis.

  7. At the urging of a reviewer, though at the risk of preempting the conclusions reached in section 4.4, I’d like to make clear that the explanatory flaws to be identified are the functional decomposition of working memory into the maintenance and manipulation of information, alongside its wide purview over most cognitive activity.

  8. Rather, Cherniak is largely pulling from textbook and reference sources, including Klatzky (1975).

  9. Specifically, during the delay period common to working memory task paradigms. In most working memory tasks, a target is presented to be maintained or manipulated, followed by a delay period in which the target disappears, and during which time distractors may be introduced. Afterwards, an additional target or response probe is introduced.

  10. I’d like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to expand on this point.

  11. Here, the monkeys were shown a piece of fruit that was placed in one of three locations, they had to retain that information while a screen was lowered, and only after a delay were they tasked with indicating the location of the fruit (Kubota and Niki 1971, 338).

  12. As a caveat, these are very rudimentary tasks, often only requiring the maintenance of three or four stimuli, and other deficits, particularly in monitoring the task, were correlated with prefrontal damage; however, the tasks are identical to those that established the prefrontal dogma of maintenance-c.

  13. The jadeite/nephrite example is a classic case of the same phenomenon in action (Hacking 2007).

  14. Recall that D’Esposito and Postle’s (1999) earlier work debunking the prefrontal dogma of working memory featured similar paradigms in humans.

  15. And it appears that Chimpanzees are also capable of successfully negotiating dual-task conditions (consult Völter et al. 2019, especially experiment 2).

  16. Cf. Hume’s distinction of the force and vivacity brought on by impressions versus ideas for a similar intuition.

  17. In fact, this is made explicit by Postle (2016) who stipulates that working memory must require prefrontal control, and so tasks that fail to recruit the prefrontal cortex should not count as proper working memory tasks (45).

  18. I’d like to thank a reviewer for persuading me to reflect on these issues.

  19. That is, it’s not clear that these are treated as natural kinds or natural kind candidates, though they might be thought of as property clusters anchored by representational (e.g., by using primarily analog or iconic representations: Quilty-Dunn 2019), computational (e.g., by featuring aspects of modularity: Firestone and Scholl 2016), or behavioral (e.g., by reverse-engineering the paradigms and tasks used to test perceptual capacities in a similar way to Buckner’s 2015 treatment of cognition) features

  20. And, conversely, that artificially restricting working memory to a post hoc subset of tasks (e.g., manipulation tasks) will leave it unable to project to the broader class of central cognitions that it is thought to support.

  21. At the same time, the explanatory landscape pictured above should help identify other cognitive categories, particularly attention, intention, and executive function, which share working memory’s position in the ‘explanatory stack’ and may be subject to a similar argumentative strategy.

  22. Again, thanks to a reviewer for raising this concern.

  23. As I envision it, this project would build upon and extend a useful heuristic that I’ve come to half-jokingly term the second paragraph rule. Most empirical papers on working memory begin with a formulaic description of working memory as the capacity that enables us to maintain and manipulate information, etc., before citing Baddeley’s or Cowan’s or another popular model. Afterwards, and sometimes as soon as the second paragraph, the authors make clear the specific iteration of maintenance or manipulation under investigation. Consult Zanto et al. 2011 paper for an excellent example of this heuristic in action, where their focus is, in fact, understanding how impacts to top down activity projected on visual cortices affects selective attention and recognition. This process, under the productive pessimism that I’m advocating, would be a candidate description for how we maintain information. Ideally, much of the work of perusing the literature could be managed using machine learning or natural language processing, quickly yielding a trove of similar candidate descriptions.

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Acknowledgements

This project could not have been realized without the continued support and feedback from friends and colleagues, and a number of helpful audiences from the ESPP in 2015, the SSPP in 2018, the Neural Mechanisms Online Webconference in 2018, and the 2019 Workshop on Natural Kinds and Cognitive Science hosted by York University. I am especially grateful to Lisa Miracchi and the MIRA group at the University of Pennsylvania, to David Rosenthal and the CUNY Cognitive Science Speakers Series, and to Michael Pauen and his group at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, for allowing me to workshop iterations of this paper. I am also indebted to Matthew Rachar, Tyler Brooke-Wilson, Jesse Prinz, John Greenwood, Felipe de Brigard, Shaun Nichols, Eric Mandelbaum, and a slew of anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts. Finally, I am particularly grateful for the support of some of my earliest mentors, including Carol Seger and especially Whit Schonbein, for persuading me to look critically at working memory and for their immense help throughout this long process.

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    Javier Gomez-Lavin

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Gomez-Lavin, J. Working memory is not a natural kind and cannot explain central cognition. Rev.Phil.Psych. 12, 199–225 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-020-00507-4

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