Distraction embedded in working memory tasks leads to impaired performance. This impairment is mitigated when targets and distractors that follow them share common features--a signature effect of interference by superposition. Here we propose that target-distractor similarity modulates not only forgetting from working memory but also encoding into…

The relationship between working memory (WM) and language processing has been extensively investigated in cognitive research. Previous studies mostly obtain evidence from measuring the involvement of WM in complex syntactic structures reported with well-established processing asymmetry, e.g., relative clauses (RCs) in English. Rarely considered is…

Prioritizing what information to learn based on value is a critical developmental skill. Across two studies, value-based memory was assessed predominately in White children aged 6- to 7-years-old and 9- to 10-years-old using a nationwide sample collected between 2020 and 2023. Children learned cue-target associations worth varying point values.…

Throughout prolonged tasks, visual attention fluctuates temporally in response to the present stimuli, task demands, and changes in available attentional resources. This temporal fluctuation has downstream effects on memory for stimuli presented during the task. Researchers have established that detection of a target (e.g., a square of a color to…

Ancient as well as modern writers have promoted the idea that bizarre images enhance memory. Research has documented bizarreness effects, with one standard technique finding that sentences describing unusual, implausible, or bizarre scenarios are better remembered than sentences describing plausible, every day, or common scenarios. Not…

There is growing recognition that working memory and selective attention are highly related. However, a key function of selective attention--ignoring distractors--is much less understood in the domain of working memory. In the attention domain, it is now clear that distractors' task relevance and stimulation of multiple senses at a time (i.e.,…

The various ways in which forgetting, an inherent component of the human memory process, occurs are essential for understanding cognitive function and memory control. This paper investigates the main categories of forgetting, including retrieval failure, decay, interference, motivated or conscious forgetting, and encoding failures. Retrieval…

The production effect is a well-established finding: If some words within a list are read aloud, that is, produced, they are better remembered than their silently read neighbors. The effect has been extensively studied with long-term memory tasks. Recently, using immediate serial recall and short-term order reconstruction, Saint-Aubin et al.…

Memorizing the multiplication table is a major challenge for elementary school students: there are many facts to memorize, and they are often similar to each other, which creates interference in memory. Here, we examined whether learning would improve if the degree of interference is reduced, and which memory processes are responsible for this…

Value-directed remembering refers to the tendency to best remember important information at the expense of less valuable information, and this ability may draw on strategic attentional processes. In six experiments, we investigated the role of attention in value-directed remembering by examining memory for important information under conditions of…

Memory retrieval affects subsequent memory in ways both positive (e.g., the testing effect) and negative (e.g., retrieval-induced forgetting, RIF). The changes to memory that retrieval produces can be thought of as the encoding consequences of retrieval, examined here with respect to attention. In three experiments, participants first studied…

Proactive interference (PI) occurs when previously learned memories compete with currently relevant information. Despite extensive literature investigating the effect in adults, little work has been done in young children. In three preregistered studies (N = 38, 35, 172; convenience samples from the Northeastern United States), first, we showed…

Stimuli presented with targets during a monitoring task are better remembered than stimuli presented with distractors, a result referred to as the attentional boost effect (ABE). The ABE is consistently found for item memory, but conflicting results have been reported for different assessments of associative memory, with studies of source memory…

The relation between perceptual and conceptual knowledge is a longstanding research question in developmental psychology. Here we tested children's dependence on figurative information with a reaction time/accuracy task. A sample of 151 children from 5 to 10 years were assessed from two multicultural and multiracial schools in the London (UK)…

While visual working memory has a short lifetime, residual representations can persist and disrupt currently maintained information. This phenomenon is known as proactive interference (PI), and the present study investigated whether the representations underpinning item-specific PI lose details over time. This would be expected if the memories…