Four experiments examined the effect of phonological similarity between items and distractors on complex span performance. Item-distractor similarity benefited serial recall when distractors followed the items they were similar to, but not when distractors preceded the items they were similar to. These findings are predicted by C-SOB (contextual…

Working memory updating (WMU) has been identified as a cognitive function of prime importance for everyday tasks and has also been found to be a significant predictor of higher mental abilities. Yet, little is known about the constituent processes of WMU. We suggest that operations required in a typical WMU task can be decomposed into 3 major…

We investigated the effects of the duration and type of to-be-articulated distractors during encoding of a verbal list into short-term memory (STM). Distractors and to-be-remembered items alternated during list presentation, as in the complex-span task that underlies much of working-memory research. According to an interference model of STM, known…

What drives forgetting in working memory? Recent evidence suggests that in a complex-span task in which an irrelevant processing task alternates with presentation of the memoranda, recall declines when the time taken to complete the processing task is extended while holding the time for rehearsal in between processing steps constant (Portrat,…

Three experiments with short-term recognition tasks are reported. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants decided whether a probe matched a list item specified by its spatial location. Items presented at study in a different location (intrusion probes) had to be rejected. Serial position curves of positive, new, and intrusion probes over the probed…

This article reinvestigates the claim by P. Verhaeghen, J. Cerella, and C. Basak (2004) that the focus of attention in working memory can be expanded from 1 to 4 items through practice. Using a modified version of Verhaeghen et al.'s n-back paradigm, Experiments 1 and 3 show that a signature of a one-item focus, the time cost for switching between…

Two experiments investigated whether young and old adults can temporarily remove information from a capacity-limited central component of working memory (WM) into another component, the activated part of long-term memory (LTM). Experiment 1 used a modified Sternberg recognition task (S. Sternberg, 1969); Experiment 2 used an arithmetic…