How attention and working memory work together in the pursuit of goals: The development of the sampling-remembering trade-off

Most work in the last 50 years on visual working memory and attention has used a classic psychophysical setup: participants are instructed to attend to, or remember, a set of items. This setup sidesteps the role of cognitive control; effort is maximal, tasks are simple, and strategies are limited. While this approach has yielded important insights, it provides no clear path toward an integrative theory (Kristjánsson & Draschkow, 2021) and, like studying a town’s walkability by having its college students run the 50-yard dash, it runs the danger of focusing on edge cases. Here, in this theoretical opinion article, we argue for an approach where dynamic relationships between the agent and the environment are understood functionally, in light of an agent’s goals. This means a shift in emphasis from the performance of the mechanisms underlying a narrow task (“remember these items!”) to their control in pursuit of a naturalistic goal (“make a sandwich!”, Land & Hayhoe, 2001). Here, we highlight the sampling-remembering trade-off between exploiting goal-relevant information in the environment versus maintaining it in working memory. We present a dynamic feedback model of this trade-off – where the individual weighs the subjective costs of accessing external information versus those of maintaining it in memory – using insights from existing cognitive control models based on economic principles (Kool & Botvinick, 2018). This trade-off is particularly interesting in children, as the optimal use of internal resources is even more crucial when limited. Our model makes some specific predictions for future research: 1) an individual child strikes a preferred balance between the effort to attend to goal-relevant information in the environment versus the effort to maintain it in working memory, 2) in order to maintain this balance as underlying memory and cognitive control mechanisms improve with age, the child will have to increasingly shift toward remembering, and 3) older children will show greater adaptability to changing task demands.