{"pk":26410,"title":"Deciding to Remember:Memory Maintenance as a Markov Decision Process","subtitle":null,"abstract":"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.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"memory maintenance"},{"word":"Markov Decision Process"},{"word":"cognitive control"},{"word":"working memory"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5763j7wx","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Jordan","middle_name":"W.","last_name":"Suchow","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Berkeley","department":""},{"first_name":"Thomas","middle_name":"L.","last_name":"Griffiths","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Berkeley","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26410/galley/16046/download/"}]}