Working Memory

Working memory is the cognitive system responsible for temporarily holding and manipulating information during complex tasks such as reasoning, comprehension, and learning. Unlike long-term memory, which stores information over extended periods, working memory operates over seconds to minutes and is characterized by limited capacity — famously estimated by George Miller at seven plus-or-minus two items, though contemporary research suggests the true limit is closer to three or four coherent chunks.

The dominant theoretical framework, proposed by Baddeley and Hitch, divides working memory into a central executive and modality-specific subsystems: the phonological loop for verbal material and the visuospatial sketchpad for visual and spatial information. From a systems perspective, working memory can be understood as a gated buffer where the write