A new manuscript from Matt Panichello, Brian DePasquale, Jonathan Pillow, and Tim Buschman shows how items held in working memory change over time.
We show there are two forces acting on memories. First, memories diffuse over time (presumably due to noise in neural activity). Second, memories drift over time. This drift causes your memories to morph from their original value (e.g. 'pink') to another value that occurs in the world more often (e.g. 'red'). Although this drift seems bad at first, we found it actually improves the accuracy of working memory because it counteracts the effect of diffusion!
Full paper is available at Nature Communications.
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