Mathematical transcription of the "Time-Based Resource Sharing" theory of working memory

TL;DR

This paper introduces TBRS2, a simplified mathematical model of the Time-Based Resource Sharing theory of working memory, enabling clearer analysis and testing of the model's core assumptions.

Contribution

The paper presents TBRS2, a minimalist and transparent mathematical transcription of the TBRS model, facilitating theoretical analysis and variant testing without complex architectures.

Findings

Derived several theorems from the original TBRS

Enabled testing of different refreshing process variants

Simplified analysis of memory activation dynamics

Abstract

The time-based resource sharing (TBRS) model is a prominent model of working memory that is both predictive and simple. The TBRS is the mainstream decay-based model and the most susceptible to competition with interference-based models. A connectionist implementation of the TBRS, the TBRS*, has recently been developed. However, the TBRS* is an enriched version of the TBRS, making it difficult to test the general characteristics resulting from the TBRS assumptions. Here, we describe a novel model, the TBRS2, built to be more transparent and simple than the TBRS*. The TBRS2 is minimalist and allows only a few parameters. It is a straightforward mathematical transcription of the TBRS that focuses exclusively on the activation level of memory items as a function of time. Its simplicity makes it possible to derive several theorems from the original TBRS and allows several variants of the refreshing process to be tested without relying on particular architectures.