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 biological motion refers to the continuous configuration movement of live agents in space. The perceptual processing of biological motion has the specificity of the dissociation between body form and body motion. However, there is limited evidence for whether such specificity continues when holding biological motion in working memory. We…

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…

When remembering over the short-term, long-term knowledge has a large effect on the number of correctly recalled items and little impact on memory for order. This is true, for example, when the effects of semantic category are examined. Contrary to what these findings suggest, Poirier et al. in 2015 proposed that memory for order relies on the…

The samples of evidence we use to make inferences in everyday and formal settings are often subject to selection biases. Two property induction experiments examined group and individual sensitivity to one type of selection bias: sampling frames - causal constraints that only allow certain types of instances to be sampled. Group data from both…

Although working memory (WM) is usually defined as a cognitive system coordinating processing and storage in the short term, in most WM models, memory aspects have been developed more fully than processing systems, and many studies of WM tasks have tended to focus on memory performance. The present study investigated WM functioning without…

How working memory supports dual-task performance is the focus of a long-standing debate. Most previous research on this topic has focused on participant performance data. In three experiments, we investigated whether changes in participant-reported strategies across single- and dual-task conditions might help resolve this debate by offering new…

Working memory (WM) has a limited capacity; however, this limitation can be mitigated by selecting individual items from the set currently held in WM for prioritization. The selection mechanism underlying this prioritization ability is referred to as the focus of attention (FOA) in WM. Although impressive progress has been achieved in recent…

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…

Several working memory (WM) theories assume a resource sharing between the maintenance of information and its processing, whereas other theories suppose that these 2 functions of WM rely on different pools of resources. Studies that addressed this question by examining whether dual-task costs occur in tasks combining processing and storage have…

Working memory allows us to hold specific pieces of information in an active and easily retrieved state, but what happens to that information during an unexpected interruption between study and test? To answer this question, we used a surprise trial paradigm in which an unexpected event precedes a probe of the observer's memory for a search…

Collaborative inhibition (reduced recall in collaborative vs. nominal groups) is a robust phenomenon. However, it is possible that not everyone is as susceptible to collaborative inhibition, such as those higher in working memory capacity (WMC). In the current study, we examined the relationship between WMC and collaborative inhibition.…

We used a technique known as reach tracking to investigate how individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) relate to the functioning of two processes proposed to underlie cognitive control: a threshold adjustment process that temporarily inhibits motor output in response to signals of conflict and a controlled selection process that…

Theoretical considerations and results from individual differences studies suggest that working memory and conflict resolution are interrelated functions. Yet, there is little direct evidence suggesting that they actually share common cognitive resources. To study how overcoming conflict influences the maintenance of working memory representations…

Long-term semantic memory (LTM) is known for affecting recall during working memory (WM) tasks. However, the way LTM intervenes in WM remains unknown. Moreover, the available findings are incongruent concerning how attention modulates the impact of LTM on WM. To examine this issue, the involvement of LTM representations in a complex span task was…