September 18, 2025 – Unlike typical laboratory tasks, in everyday life people decide for themselves when and how much to use their working memory (WM). In this new preprint, Levi, Kia, Dejan & collaborators explored whether people’s tendency to rely on working memory (WM usage) stays consistent overtime and differs from person to person. We found that person-specific tendencies in spontaneous WM usage (1) are measurable with high reliability in flexible, real-world contexts, (2) exhibit stable trait-like properties, (3) predict overall task performance.