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Although it is well known that distraction impairs immediate retrieval of items maintained in working memory (WM; e.g., during complex span tasks), some evidence suggests that these items are more likely to be recalled from episodic memory (EM) compared with items that were studied without any distraction (e.g., during simple span tasks). One account for this delayed advantage of complex span over simple span, or the McCabe effect (McCabe, Journal of Memory and Language, 58[2], 480–494, 2008), is that complex span affords covert retrieval opportunities that facilitate later retrieval from EM by cumulatively reactivating each successively presented item after distraction. This explanation focuses on the processing that occurs during presentation and maintenance of the items, but no work to date has explored whether the differential demands of immediate retrieval between simple and complex span may explain the effect. Accordingly, these experiments examined the impact of immediate retrieval demands on the McCabe effect by comparing typical immediate serial-recall instructions (i.e., recalling the words in their exact order of presentation) to immediate free-recall (Experiments 1–2) and no-recall (Experiments 2 and 3) instructions. The results suggested that the nature of retrieval may constrain the McCabe effect in some situations (Experiments 1–2), but its demands do not drive the McCabe effect given that it was observed in both serial-recall and no-recall conditions (Experiment 3). Instead, activities such as covert retrieval during the processing phase may underlie the McCabe effect, thus further evidencing the importance of processing in WM for the long-term retention of information. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.3758/s13421-020-01079-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

There is a growing interest in specifying the mechanisms underlying refreshing, i.e., the use of attention to keep working memory (WM) contents accessible. Here, we examined whether participants’ visual fixations during the retention interval of a WM task indicate the current focus of internal attention, thereby serving as an online measure of refreshing. Eye movements were recorded while participants studied and maintained an array of colored dots followed by probed recall of one (Experiments 1A and 1B) or all (Experiment 2) of the memoranda via a continuous color wheel. Experiments 1A and 2 entailed an unfilled retention interval in which refreshing is assumed to occur spontaneously, and Experiment 1B entailed a retention interval embedded with cues prompting the sequential refreshment of a subset of the memoranda. During the retention interval, fixations revisited the locations occupied by the memoranda, consistent with a looking-at-nothing phenomenon in WM, but the pattern was only evident when placeholders were onscreen in Experiment 2, indicating that most of these fixations may largely reflect random gaze. Furthermore, spontaneous fixations did not predict recall precision (Experiments 1A and 2), even when ensuring that they did not reflect random gaze (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1B, refreshing cues increased fixations to the eventually tested target and predicted better recall precision, which interacted with an overall benefit of target fixations, such that the benefit of fixations decreased as the number of refreshing cues increased. Thus, fixations under spontaneous conditions had no credible effect on recall precision, whereas the beneficial effect of fixations under instructed refreshing conditions may indicate situations in which cues were disregarded. Consequently, we conclude that eye movements do not seem suitable as an online measure of refreshing.

Working memory (WM) represents the capacity to store and process a limited amount of information. To better understand developmental changes of WM forms a key topic in research on neuropsychology of aging. Previous studies reveal age differences in WM and in executive functions (EFs). Although EFs are seen as essential mechanisms in WM, the specific relation between the two cognitive constructs thus far remains unclear. The present study set out to investigate the unique roles of the three main facets of EFs (i.e., updating, inhibition, and shifting) in accounting for age-related variability in WM. Therefore, 175 younger and 107 older adults performed a battery of cognitive tests, including measures of WM, EFs, and processing speed. A set of statistical approaches, including regression analyses and path models, was used to examine the cognitive correlates that could explain individual and age-related variance in WM. Significant age differences were found in WM and on EF measures. Regression analyses and path models showed that updating and inhibition, but not shifting, played a major role in explaining age-related variance in WM. In sum, findings suggest that updating and inhibition are most influential for age differences in WM. The results further show that age and processing speed do not significantly contribute to variability in WM performance beyond executive resource. The present findings have implications for conceptual and developmental theories of WM and may further offer an initial empirical basis for developing possible trainings to improve older adults' WM performance by strengthening the efficiency of updating and inhibitory processes.

Objectives It is well known that age differentially impacts aspects of long-term episodic memory (EM): Whereas a binding deficit indicates that older adults are less capable than younger adults to encode or retrieve associations between information (e.g., the pairing between two memoranda, such as lock – race), item memory is relatively intact (e.g., recognizing lock without its original pairing). Method We tested whether this deficit could be corrected by facilitating establishment of the bindings in working memory (WM) through adapting the semantic relatedness of studied pairs according to participants’ ongoing performance (Experiments 1 and 2). We also examined whether this was evident for the long-term retention of pairs that were not tested in WM (Experiment 2). Results The results revealed matched binding and item memory in WM and EM between age groups. Most importantly, older adults required increased semantic strength between word pairs to achieve similar performance to that of younger adults, regardless of whether pairs were immediately tested during the WM task. Discussion These findings indicate that relying on their superior semantic memory can correct the commonly exhibited profound deficit in binding memory in older age.

Two main mechanisms, articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing, are argued to be involved in the maintenance of verbal information in working memory (WM). Whereas converging research has suggested that rehearsal promotes the phonological representations of memoranda in working memory, little is known about the representations that refreshing may promote. Not only would examining this question address this gap in the literature, but the investigation has profound implications for different theoretical proposals of how refreshing functions and on the relationships between WM and long-term memory (LTM). Accordingly, we tested predictions from 5 models regarding how refreshing may moderate the semantic representation of memoranda in verbal WM. This series of 4 experiments presented a cue word that was either semantically or phonologically related to a target during the recall phase of a complex span task. Experiment 1 established the benefit of semantic over phonological retrieval cues, and Experiment 2 established that this semantic benefit was specific to a refreshing-rather than a rehearsal-based maintenance strategy. Finally, we showed that this semantic benefit did not vary with the cognitive load of the concurrent task (Experiments 3 and 4) or the intention to learn the memoranda (Experiment 4). These results indicate that cue-based retrieval from episodic LTM may strongly contribute to semantic processing effects in WM recall, but this influence of episodic LTM is independent of the function of refreshing to reactivate memory traces. Accordingly, these results have strong implications for the functioning of refreshing and the links between WM and LTM. (PsycINFO Database Record

Impairments in refreshing have been suggested as one source of working memory (WM) deficits in older age. Retro-cues provide an important method of investigating this question: a retro-cue guides attention to one WM item, thereby arguably refreshing it and increasing its accessibility compared with a no-cue baseline. In contrast to the refreshing deficit hypothesis, intact retro-cue benefits have been found in older adults. Refreshing, however, is assumed to boost not one but several WM representations when sequentially applied to them. Hence, intact refreshing requires the flexible switching of attention among WM items. So far, it remains an open question whether older adults show this flexibility. Here, we investigated whether older adults can use multiple cues to sequentially refresh WM representations. Younger and older adults completed a continuous-color delayed-estimation task, in which the number of retro-cues (0, 1, or 2) presented during the retention interval was manipulated. The results showed a similar retro-cue benefit for younger and older adults, even in the two-cue condition in which participants had to switch attention between items to refresh representations in WM. These findings suggest that the capacity to use cues to refresh information in visual WM may be preserved with age.

Working memory is one of the most important topics of research in cognitive psychology. The cognitive revolution that introduced the computer metaphor to describe human cognitive functioning called for this system in charge of the temporary storage of incoming or retrieved information to permit its processing. In the past decades, one particular mechanism of maintenance, attentional refreshing, has attracted an increasing amount of interest in the field of working memory. However, this mechanism remains rather mysterious, and its functioning is conceived in very different ways across the literature. This article presents an up-to-date review on attentional refreshing through the joint effort of leading researchers in the domain. It highlights points of agreement and delineates future avenues of research.

Objectives Refreshing, or the act of briefly foregrounding recently presented but now perceptually absent representations, has been identified as a possible source of age differences in working memory and episodic memory. We investigated whether the refreshing deficit contributes to the well-known age-related deficit for retrieving nonsemantic associations, but has no impact on existing semantic associations. Method Younger and older adults judged the relatedness of stimulus word pairs (e.g., pink–blue or pink–cop) after repeating or refreshing one of the words. During a later source recognition memory test, participants determined whether each item recognized as old was presented on the left or right (nonsemantic source memory) and presented in a related or unrelated pair (semantic source memory). The data were analyzed using a hierarchical Bayesian implementation of a multinomial model of multidimensional source memory. Results Neither age group exhibited a refreshing benefit to nonsemantic or semantic source memory parameters. There was a large age difference in nonsemantic source memory, but no age difference in semantic source memory. Discussion The study suggests that the nature of the association is most important to episodic memory performance in older age, irrespective of refreshing, such that source memory is unimpaired for semantically meaningful information.

Maintenance of information in working memory (WM) is assumed to rely on refreshing and elaboration, but clear mechanistic descriptions of these cognitive processes are lacking, and it is unclear whether they are simply two labels for the same process. This fMRI study investigated the extent to which refreshing, elaboration, and repeating of items in WM are distinct neural processes with dissociable behavioral outcomes in WM and long-term memory (LTM). Multivariate pattern analyses of fMRI data revealed differentiable neural signatures for these processes, which we also replicated in an independent sample of older adults. In some cases, the degree of neural separation within an individual predicted their memory performance. Elaboration improved LTM, but not WM, and this benefit increased as its neural signature became more distinct from repetition. Refreshing had no impact on LTM, but did improve WM, although the neural discrimination of this process was not predictive of the degree of improvement. These results demonstrate that refreshing and elaboration are separate processes that differently contribute to memory performance.HighlightsRepeated reading, refreshing, and elaboration are differentiable in brain activation patterns in both young and older adults.Elaboration selectively improved long-term memory for young adults, and the size of the benefit was related to the neural separability of elaboration from other processes.Older adults implemented a sub-optimal form of elaboration, and this may be a factor contributing to age-related deficits in long-term memory.Ethics statementThe study was approved by the ethical review board of the canton of Zurich (BASEC-No. 2017-00190) and all subjects gave informed written consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.Data and code availability statementAll behavioral data and analysis scripts can be assessed on the Open Science Framework (osf.io/p2h8b/). The fMRI data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, LMB. The fMRI data are not publicly available due to restrictions of the Swiss Ethics Committees on research involving humans regarding data containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.

Deficits in the use of attention to refresh representations are argued to underlie age-related decline in working memory (WM). Retro-cues guide attention to WM contents, enabling the direct assessment of refreshing in WM. This preregistered study investigated aging deficits in refreshing via retro-cues and the preservation of refreshing boosts after distraction incurred by a secondary task. The distractor task is assumed to impede refreshing by engaging attention away from the memoranda. Any free time available before or after distractor processing, however, can be used to resume refreshing thereby ameliorating distractor-related interference. Accordingly, by varying the time available to complete the distractor task, one can vary refreshing opportunities, an effect known as cognitive load. Using an individually calibrated task that controlled for WM capacity and speed of processing, we demonstrate that focusing attention on WM representations is similarly efficient in younger and older adults. However, younger adults were able to retain this retro-cue benefit despite increasing cognitive load, whereas increasing cognitive load reduced the retro-cue benefit in older adults, suggesting that they are less able to protect focused representations from distractor-interference. This shows that aging impacts specific subcomponents of refreshing, such that the benefit of focusing attention is relatively intact in older age, but older adults struggle to preserve the refreshing benefit against distraction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The current experiments investigated the long-term advantage for words studied during complex span versus simple span, i.e., the McCabe effect. According to the covert retrieval account, the McCabe effect occurs because complex span affords covert retrieval opportunities that facilitate episodic memory (EM). Conversely, the time-in-working-memory (WM) hypothesis asserts that the time items spend in WM predicts EM, irrespective of any opportunity for covert retrieval. We investigated whether time specifically allows for elaboration in WM by considering the influence of reported and instructed strategies during simple span, complex span, and slow span, where for the latter, a pause of equivalent duration to the distraction in complex span interleaved the memoranda. The results indicated that (i) elaboration is just as frequent during complex span as slow span and (ii) spontaneous elaboration accentuates the advantage of complex span and slow span over simple span, commensurate with the elaboration account of the time-in-WM hypothesis.

The distinguishability between working memory (WM) and long-term memory has been a frequent and long-lasting source of debate in the literature. One recent method of identifying the relationship between the two systems has been to consider the influence of long-term memory effects, such as the levels-of-processing (LoP) effect, in WM. However, the few studies that have examined the LoP effect in WM have shown divergent results. This study examined the LoP effect in WM by considering a theoretically meaningful methodological aspect of the LoP span task. Specifically, we fixed the presentation duration of the processing component a priori because such fixed complex span tasks have shown differences when compared to unfixed tasks in terms of recall from WM as well as the latent structure of WM. After establishing a fixed presentation rate from a pilot study, the LoP span task presented memoranda in red or blue font that were immediately followed by two processing words that matched the memoranda in terms of font color or semantic relatedness. On presentation of the processing words, participants made deep or shallow processing decisions for each of the memoranda before a cue to recall them from WM. Participants also completed delayed recall of the memoranda. Results indicated that LoP affected delayed recall, but not immediate recall from WM. These results suggest that fixing temporal parameters of the LoP span task does not moderate the null LoP effect in WM, and further indicate that WM and long-term episodic memory are dissociable on the basis of LoP effects.

Previous work regarding a counterintuitive benefit of increasing distractors on episodic long-term memory (LTM) has suggested that retrieval of memoranda in working memory (WM) after attention has been distracted may confer benefits to episodic LTM. The current study investigated 2 conceptions of how this may occur: either as an attentional refreshing of active memoranda within the focus of attention or as retrieval of a cohesive chunk of memoranda from outside the central component of WM. Given the literature suggesting that increasing the number of items to maintain in WM, or list length, incurs an attentional cost, the current study investigated whether increasing list length may reduce the beneficial impact of distractors on episodic LTM. In a series of three experiments, we manipulated list length and the number of distractors following the memoranda in a Brown-Peterson-like-span task. Despite profound negative effects of list length and distractors on initial recall, the results indicated that list length did not interact with the beneficial effect of distractors on final free recall of the items. Furthermore, final free recall was consistent across serial position, in line with the view that all of the memoranda are retrieved as a chunk after each distractor. These findings emphasize the notion that recovering inactive information from outside of the central component of WM may impact its long-term retention. The theoretical implications regarding how retrieval may be a means by which LTM processes influence WM are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Although complex span tasks are believed to require controlled attention, many studies have indicated the effects of automaticity on working memory (WM) measures. In two experiments, we disentangled recollection and familiarity using an adaptation of the process dissociation procedure). In two blocks of reasoning span (Experiment 1) and Brown–Peterson span (Experiment 2) tasks, participants studied five discrete to-be-remembered digits (0–9) for either 1 or 3 sec while also solving reasoning problems (Does B follow C? BC). Participants were instructed to report the five presented digits (inclusion) or the five digits that were not presented (exclusion). Estimates of recollection but not familiarity differed as a function of presentation rate. Furthermore, recollection was more reliable than the typically used inclusion performance and strongly related to fluid intelligence. These results help to elucidate the functionally distinct roles of recollection and familiarity in WM.

Impairments in refreshing have been suggested as one source of working memory (WM) deficits in older age. Retro-cues provide an important method of investigating this question: a retro-cue guides attention to one WM item, thereby arguably refreshing it and increasing its accessibility compared with a no-cue baseline. In contrast to the refreshing deficit hypothesis, intact retro-cue benefits have been found in older adults. Refreshing, however, is assumed to boost not one but several WM representations when sequentially applied to them. Hence, intact refreshing requires the flexible switching of attention among WM items. So far, it remains an open question whether older adults show this flexibility. Here, we investigated whether older adults can use multiple cues to sequentially refresh WM representations. Younger and older adults completed a continuous-color delayed-estimation task, in which the number of retro-cues (0, 1, or 2) presented during the retention interval was manipulated. The results showed a similar retro-cue benefit for younger and older adults, even in the two-cue condition in which participants had to switch attention between items to refresh representations in WM. These findings suggest that the capacity to use cues to refresh information in visual WM may be preserved with age.

Much research has investigated the qualitative experience of retrieving events from episodic memory (EM). The present study investigated whether covert retrieval in WM increases the phenomenological characteristics that participants find memorable in EM using tasks that distract attention from the maintenance of memoranda (i.e., complex span; Experiment 1) relative to tasks that do not (i.e., short or long list lengths of simple span; Experiments 1 and 2). Participants rated the quality of the phonological, semantic, and temporal-contextual characteristics remembered during a delayed memory characteristics questionnaire (MCQ). Whereas an advantage of the complex over simple span items was observed for each characteristic (Experiment 1), no such difference was observed between short and long trials of simple span (Experiment 2). These results are consistent with the view that covert retrieval in WM promotes content-context bindings that are later accessible from EM for both objective performance and subjective details of the remembered information.

Working memory (WM) capacity measured through complex span tasks is among the best predictors of fluid intelligence (Gf). These tasks usually involve maintaining memoranda while performing complex cognitive activities that require a rather high level of education (e.g., reading comprehension, arithmetic), restricting their range of applicability. Because individual differences in such complex activities are nothing more than the concatenation of small differences in their elementary constituents, complex span tasks involving elementary processes should be as good of predictors of Gf as traditional tasks. The present study showed that two latent variables issued from either traditional or new span tasks involving time-constrained elementary activities were similarly correlated with Gf. Moreover, a model with a single unitary WM factor had a similar fit as a model with two distinct WM factors. Thus, time-constrained elementary activities can be integrated in WM tasks, permitting the assessment of WM in a wider range of populations.

Objectives. The assumption that working memory (WM) is embedded within long-term memory suggests that the effectiveness of switching information between activated states in WM (i.e., attentional refreshing) may depend on whether that information is semantically relevant. Given that older adults often have greater general knowledge than younger adults, age-related deficits in episodic memory (EM) could be ameliorated by studying information that has existing semantic representations compared with unknown information. Method. Younger and older adults completed a modified operation span task that varied the number of refreshing opportunities. The memoranda used were equally known to younger and older adults (neutral words; e.g., father), better known to older adults than younger adults (dated words; e.g., mirth), or unknown to both groups (unknown words; e.g., cobot). Results. Results for immediate and delayed recall indicated an age-related improvement for dated memoranda and no age difference for unknown memoranda. Furthermore, refreshing opportunities predicted delayed recall of neutral memoranda more strongly for younger adults than older adults, whereas older adults’ recall advantage for dated memoranda was explained by their prior knowledge and not refreshing opportunities. Discussion. The results suggest that older adults’ EM deficits could potentially be ameliorated by incorporating their superior knowledge to supplement relatively ineffective attentional refreshing in WM.

Is forgotten information deemed less important than remembered information? The present study examined potential biases regarding the importance of information that was initially forgotten. In Experiment 1 participants studied words paired with varying point values that denoted their importance and were encouraged to recall higher value words. Participants recalled more high-value words on an initial test. However, on a later cued recall test for the values, initially forgotten words were rated as less valuable than remembered words. Experiment 2 used a similar procedure with the exception that participants rated the importance of traits when evaluating a significant other (e.g., honest, intelligent). Participants were more likely to recall highly valued traits but regarded forgotten traits as less valuable than remembered traits. These results suggest that a forgetting bias exists: If information is initially forgotten, it is later deemed as less important.

The McCabe effect (McCabe, Journal of Memory and Language 58:480-494, 2008) refers to an advantage in episodic memory (EM) retrieval for memoranda studied in complex span versus simple span tasks, particularly for memoranda presented in earlier serial positions. This finding has been attributed to the necessity to refresh memoranda during complex span tasks that, in turn, promotes content-context binding in working memory (WM). Several frameworks have conceptualized WM as being embedded in long-term memory. Thus, refreshing may be less efficient when memoranda are not well-established in long-term semantic memory (SM). To investigate this, we presented words and nonwords in simple and complex span trials in order to manipulate the long-term semantic representations of the memoranda with the requirement to refresh the memoranda during WM. A recognition test was administered that required participants to make a remember-know decision for each memorandum recognized as old. The results replicated the McCabe effect, but only for words, and the beneficial effect of refreshing opportunities was exclusive to recollection. These results extend previous research by indicating that the predictive relationship between WM refreshing and long-term EM is specific to recollection and, furthermore, moderated by representations in long-term SM. This supports the predictions of WM frameworks that espouse the importance of refreshing in content-context binding, but also those that view WM as being an activated subset of and, therefore, constrained by the contents of long-term memory.

Three experiments are reported that addressed the nature of processing in working memory by investigating patterns of delayed cued recall and free recall of items initially studied during complex and simple span tasks. In Experiment 1, items initially studied during a complex span task (i.e., operation span) were more likely to be recalled after a delay in response to temporal-contextual cues, relative to items from subspan and supraspan list lengths in a simple span task (i.e., word span). In Experiment 2, items initially studied during operation span were more likely to be recalled from neighboring serial positions during delayed free recall than were items studied during word span trials. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the number of attentional refreshing opportunities strongly predicts episodic memory performance, regardless of whether the information is presented in a spaced or massed format in a modified operation span task. The results indicate that the content-context bindings created during complex span trials reflect attentional refreshing opportunities that are used to maintain items in working memory.