Schedule of Events | Symposia

Flexible redistribution of working memory resources enables distraction-resilient behaviors in dynamic environments

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Ziyao Zhang¹ (ziyaopsy@gmail.com), Jarrod Lewis-Peacock¹; ¹Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin

Navigating daily tasks relies on working memory to recall past information and plan future actions. When managing multiple goals, individuals must allocate limited working memory resources across them. A key factor influencing this resource allocation is the agent’s state. For instance, when following a shopping list, decisions about which memory item to prioritize depend largely on the person’s location. In real-world scenarios, agent states are dynamic and often disrupted by distractions (e.g., promotions altering shopping plans). How people adapt to such perturbations remains unclear, as classical studies typically fix agent states. To address this, we developed a working memory paradigm (N=50) inspired by the arcade game Snake, simulating agent movements in a dynamic environment. Participants controlled a snake to locate memorized targets (apples) and earn points. Each trial required encoding 1, 2, or 4 apple locations, followed by memory-guided navigation to capture all apples. In half of the trials, distractions (grapes) forced participants to deviate from initial plans and update the snake’s position. Without distractions, participants prioritized proximate targets, using proximity as a cue for memory resource allocation. When distractions perturbed the agent’s position, participants flexibly redistributed resources to prioritize targets nearer the updated position. This flexibility declined with higher memory loads: proximity biases persisted under set size 2 but weakened under set size 4 with strong distractions. These findings reveal a novel mechanism of dynamic working memory resource redistribution that enables resilience to distractions and supports adaptive goal-directed behavior in naturalistic environments.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Working memory