What is working memory for? An ethological approach to working memory in children and adults

Typical visual working memory tasks involve many trials of rapid presentations of simple stimuli to be remembered across short delays. This is rarely how memory is used in the real world: we are almost always able to resample information by making an action just-in-time (eye or head movements) or create one if our memory is not sufficient (cognitive offloading). Deciding how often to sample vs. how much to remember depends on the costs of each option. In this chapter, we bring together work on active online visual memory, research on the sampling-remembering trade-off, cognitive offloading, and for a broader modeling context, resource rational models, which each provide important building blocks for developing a new, ethological approach to the study of working memory. This new approach not only centers new problems in the field, but also provides new insights into the mechanisms of developmental change and individual differences.