Working Memory: laptop battery or fading light

A short article on SciAm website reports research by Cognitive psychologists Weiwei Zhang and Stephen J. Luck at the University of California. They challenge long held beliefs that working memory fades gradually over a few seconds. Instead, their research suggests that working memory is held accurately for a period then dissappears suddenly.

Luck says the system is like a laptop as compared with a flashlight. “The laptop is an active system that uses feedback circuits to limit how much power it draws,” he says. So whereas a flash­light dims when it runs low on juice, “the computer runs perfectly normally while the battery drains,” he says, “until suddenly the laptop shuts off.”

Read the short article here: Abruptly Forgotten: Working Memory Disappears in a Blink: Scientific American

My question is “What happens to trigger the sudden shutdown?”

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