The n-back task is a frequently used measure of working memory (WM) in cognitive neuroscience research contexts, and it has become widely adopted in other areas over the last decade. This study aimed to obtain normative data for the n-back task from a large sample of children and adolescents. To this end, a computerized verbal n-back task with three levels of WM load (1-back, 2-back, and 3-back) was administered to 3722 Spanish school children aged 7–13 years. Results showed an overall age-related increase in performance for the different levels of difficulty. This trend was less pronounced at 1-back than at 2-back when hits were considered. Gender differences were also observed, with girls outperforming boys although taking more time to respond. The theoretical implications of these results are discussed. Normative data stratified by age and gender for the three WM load levels are provided.

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Errors in a running memory task are analysed. Participants were presented with a variable-length list of items and were asked to report the last four items. It has been proposed (Morris & Jones, 1990) that this task requires two mechanisms: the temporal storage of the target set by the articulatory loop and its updating by the central executive. Two implicit assumptions in this proposal are (a) the preservation of serial order, and (b) participants' capacity to discard earlier items from the target subset as list presentation is running, and new items are appended. Order preservation within the updated target list and the inhibition of the outdated list items should imply a relatively higher rate of location errors for items from the medial positions of the target list and a lower rate of intrusion errors from the outdated and inhibited items from the pretarget positions. Contrary to these expectations, for both consonants (Experiment 1) and words (Experiment 2) we found recency effects and a relatively high rate of intrusions from the final pretarget positions, most of them from the very last. Similar effects were apparent with the embedded four-item lists for catch trials. These results are clearly at odds with the presumed updating by the central executive.

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This study analyzed the mechanisms involved in possible transfer effects for two different working memory updating (WMU) training programs administered to young adults and based on two updating paradigms: n -back and arithmetical updating. The influence of practice distribution on transfer effects was also explored by including two training regimens: massed and spaced practice. Performance on different WMU tasks more or less structurally similar to the tasks used in the training was assessed to analyze the nearest transfer effects. Near and far transfer effects were tested using complex working memory (WM) and fluid intelligence tasks. The results showed that the WMU training produced gains in only some of the WMU tasks structurally similar to those used in the training, not in those lacking the same structure, or in WM or fluid intelligence tasks. These limited nearest transfer effects suggest that gains could be due to the acquisition of a specific strategy appropriate for the task during the training rather than to any improvement in the updating process per se. Performance did not differ depending on the training regimen.

Inhibition is considered to have an important role in memory retrieval. However, many experimental results suggest that its efficiency declines with aging. In this study, the authors tested this hypothesis by using the retrieval-practice task. The retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) observed with this paradigm is normally explained in terms of inhibition. Young (mean age 21.5 years) and older (mean age 71.6 years) adults studied sets of four shared-subject sentences. A retrieval-practice phase required participants to repeatedly recall a subset of the studied sentences. In the final test, participants were provided item-specific cues and told to recall all the studied sentences. RIF was similar for both age groups, suggesting comparable inhibitory efficiency in young and older adults.

Two experiments examined the role of numerical distance in updating numerical information in working memory. In the first experiment, participants had to memorize a new number only when it was smaller than a previously memorized number. In the second experiment, updating was based on an external signal, which removed the need to perform any numerical comparison. In both experiments, distance between the memorized number and the new one was manipulated. The results showed that smaller distances between the new and the old information led to shorter updating times. This graded facilitation suggests that the process by which information is substituted in the focus of attention involves maintaining the shared features between the new and the old number activated and selecting other new features to be activated. Thus, the updating cost may be related to amount of new features to be activated in the focus of attention. Keywords Working memory . Updating . Numerical distanceUpdating is a process which allows people to replace and modify the content of working memory (WM) in order to hold new information (Morris & Jones, 1990), and it is considered a fundamental executive function in cognitive architecture (Miyake, Friedman, Emerson, Witzki, & Howerter, 2000). To investigate this process, tasks have been designed which involved simultaneously maintaining different elements in memory, some of which have to be replaced by new information. Many studies have examined the mechanisms involved in the selective access to the content of WM or in replacing outdated information (Garavan, 1998 . However, little study has been given to the possible role played by the relationship between the information maintained in memory and the new information that replaces it. This study aims to address this question by investigating how the numerical distance between the stored and the new numerical information influences the updating process.Updating tasks have been used to study selective access in WM since Garavan (1998) introduced the double counter task. In this task, participants had to keep two counters in memory for two different figures. Participants updated the appropriate mental count by adding one unit when the corresponding figure was presented. Garavan's main finding was that the time used to update the information was longer when there was a switch from one counter to the other, that is, when the counter to be updated was different from the counter previously updated. These results suggest that people do not have simultaneous access to all of the content of WM, but can only attend to one stimulus at a time. This effect fits the theoretical models which conceive WM as a hierarchical system of active representations in long-term memory (Cowan, 1995;Oberauer, 2002). In this system, Oberauer (2002) has proposed the existence of a focus of attention in WM which maintains the representation which a person is aware of at a given moment and on which the next