ABSTRACT
Working memory is among the most intensively studied cognitive processes in both
cognitive psychology and neuroscience, and yet results from the two fields have not made
as much contact with each other as one might hope. For example, cognitive psychology
has discovered a host of robust empirical phenomena associated with verbal working
memory and has developed elegant theoretical models, such as Baddeley’s phonological
loop, that can explain the empirical results (Baddeley, 1986). Nevertheless, the details of
how these psychological hypotheses are instantiated in the brain is an open question (but
see Burgess & Hitch, 1999, for one recent proposal). Similarly, there is a substantial body
of neuroscientific research investigating the neural substrates of working memory in both
animals (Fuster, 1973; Funahashi, Bruce, & Goldman-Rakic, 1989) and humans (Smith &
Jonides, 1999), but this work has typically only addressed a small subset of the rich
behavioral data and theories available in cognitive psychology.
