Date of Award

Fall 11-21-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering

Organizational Unit

Daniel Felix Ritchie School of Engineering and Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Haluk Öǧmen

Second Advisor

Mohammad Mahoor

Third Advisor

Timothy Sweeny

Fourth Advisor

Kimon Valavanis

Fifth Advisor

Srimant Tripathy

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

All Rights Reserved
All Rights Reserved.

Keywords

Sensory memory (SM), Short-term memory (STM), Long-term memory (LTM), Information processing

Abstract

Information is encoded and stored in three types of memory: sensory memory (SM), short-term memory (STM), and long-term memory (LTM). SM has a large capacity but retains information for only a brief period. When information transfers to STM, only a limited amount can be stored. Information in STM can then be transferred to LTM, which has a much larger capacity and longer retention time. STM is often conceptualized as working memory (WM) to highlight its role in active information processing. Due to the limited capacity of STM, it is commonly believed that STM serves as the bottleneck for information processing. However, the Leaky Flask model has been proposed to challenge classical memory models. A key objective of Aim 1 (Project One) is to generalize this model. Additionally, we explore various block diagram models of memory to investigate how the statistical properties of mixture models relate to the underlying mechanisms of information processing. Updating WM is essential for daily tasks and involves either partial or global updates. A partial update modifies only a portion of the stored information and involves an active removal process when an appropriate cue is provided. The objective of Aim 2 (Projects Two & Three) is to experimentally and computationally examine the dynamics of the WM updating process. In Project Two, we found that the dynamics of WM partial updates depend on set size and spatial layout for categorical stimuli. In project three, similar patterns were observed for continuous stimuli, suggesting that spatial layout-related update dynamics represent a more general process in WM updating.

Copyright Date

11-2025

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Shaoying Wang

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

English (eng)

Extent

181 pgs

File Size

5.3 MB

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