Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Working memory is a limited-capacity form of human mem-ory that actively holds information in mind. Which memoriesought to be maintained? We approach this question by showingan equivalence between active maintenance in working mem-ory and a Markov decision process in which, at each moment,a cognitive control mechanism selects a memory as the targetof maintenance. The challenge of remembering is then findinga maintenance policy well-suited to the task at hand. We com-pute the optimal policy under various conditions and defineplausible cognitive mechanisms that can approximate these op-timal policies. Framing the problem of maintenance in thisway makes it possible to capture in a single model many of theessential behavioral phenomena of memory maintenance, in-cluding directed forgetting and self-directed remembering. Fi-nally, we consider the case of imperfect metamemory — wherethe current state of memory is only partially observable — andshow that the fidelity of metamemory determines the effective-ness of maintenance.