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Poster A in Poster Session A: Tuesday, August 4, 9:30 – 11:15 am, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Task demands and inductive biases jointly shape the generality of working memory gating policies

Aalok Sathe¹, Ellie Pavlick¹, Michael Frank¹; ¹Brown University

Presenter: Aalok Sathe

Working memory (WM) is central to complex cognitive capabilities such as planning and decision-making across humans and animals. Deciding what information may be relevant in the future and robustly maintaining it while ignoring irrelevant information is the problem of WM management or gating that animals appear to solve across diverse domains. In this work we ask what aspects of task demands and a system's inductive biases shape WM management strategies in a way that are generalizable across tasks or specifically tuned to tasks. We find that networks with explicit architectural bias for gating, such as LSTMs, show facilitation when exposed to one WM task and trained on another. On the other hand, RNNs and transformers show interference, where, gating-like strategies do not transfer between WM tasks, instead, harming a trained network relative to random initialization. Taken together, our work sheds new light on the evolutionary and developmental contributions to animals' WM management.

Topic Area: Memory, Learning & Knowledge Structures