We review our research on the episodic buffer in the multicomponent model of working memory (Baddeley, 2000), making explicit the influence of Anne Treisman's work on the way our research has developed. The crucial linking theme concerns binding, whereby the individual features of an episode are combined as integrated representations. We summarize a series of experiments on visual working memory that investigated the retention of feature bindings and individual features. The effects of cognitive load, perceptual distraction, prioritization, serial position, and their interactions form a coherent pattern. We interpret our findings as demonstrating contrasting roles of externally driven and internally driven attentional processes, as well as a distinction between visual buffer storage and the focus of attention. Our account has strong links with Treisman's concept of focused attention and aligns with a number of contemporary approaches to visual working memory. Keywords Attention. Working memory. Visual working memory Over 60 years have passed since Broadbent (1958) first presented a model linking short-term memory and attention. However, early investigation tended to concentrate on the auditory-verbal domain whereas in the visual domain, attention and short-term memory were typically studied separately. One development in bringing these perspectives together was the use of perceptually based change detection methods to investigate the capacity of visual working memory (Luck & Vogel, 1997). A parallel development was growing awareness of working memory among researchers studying attention in visual perception (e.g.

In visual working memory tasks, memory for an item is enhanced if participants are told that the item is relatively more valuable than others presented within the same trial. Experiment 1 explored whether these probe value boosts (termed prioritization effects in previous literature) are affected by probe frequency (i.e., how often the more valuable item is tested). Participants were presented with four colored shapes sequentially and asked to recall the color of one probed item following a delay. They were informed that the first item was more valuable (differential probe value) or as valuable as the other items (equal probe value), and that this item would be tested more frequently (differential probe frequency) or as frequently (equal probe frequency) as the other items. Probe value and probe frequency boosts were observed at the first position, though both were accompanied by costs to other items. Probe value and probe frequency boosts were additive, suggesting the manipulations yield independent effects. Further supporting this, experiment 2 revealed that probe frequency boosts are not reliant on executive resources, directly contrasting with previous findings regarding probe value. Taken together, these outcomes suggest there may be several ways in which attention can be directed in working memory.

The multicomponent model aims to provide a broad theoretical framework enabling both more detailed fractionation and analysis of its components, and a capacity for it be used fruitfully beyond the laboratory. In its current form it comprises four interacting components. Two of these are modality-specific memory storage systems, one verbal-acoustic, the phonological loop, and one visuospatial, the sketchpad. Information in both these stores can be temporarily maintained via focused attention termed ‘refreshing’, while the phonological loop can also maintain familiar verbalizable material by subvocal or overt rehearsal. Both subsystems are controlled by a third component, the central executive, a supervisory system with limited resources. The central executive is principally concerned with internally directed attentional control processes but also has a role in the attentional selection of perceptual information. Information from these three components is coordinated with information from perception and long-term memory through the fourth component, a multidimensional, multimodal episodic buffer. This component is capable of holding up to around four episodic chunks, and is a valuable but essentially passive storage system, controlled by the central executive and accessible to conscious awareness. The multicomponent model has been systematically developed using a number of experimental tools. These include, principally, similarity effects to identify the type of coding involved, concurrent task methods to assess the contributions of the various subsystems to complex tasks, and neuropsychological evidence, in particular from the study of single cases with very specific deficits. The model continues to evolve and has proved successful both in accounting for a broad range of data on memory and related cognitive areas and in its application to the understanding of a wide range of cognitive activities and populations.

Emerging literature indicates that working memory and attention interact in determining what is retained over time, though the nature of this relationship and the impacts on performance across different task contexts remain to be mapped. In the present study, four experiments examined whether participants can prioritize one or more high-reward items within a four-item target array for the purposes of an immediate cued recall task, and the extent to which this mediates the disruptive impact of a postdisplay to-be-ignored suffix. All four experiments indicated that endogenous direction of attention toward high-reward items results in their improved recall. Furthermore, increasing the number of high-reward items from one to three (Experiments 1-3) produces no decline in recall performance for those items, while associating each item in an array with a different reward value results in correspondingly graded levels of recall performance (Experiment 4). These results suggest the ability to exert precise voluntary control in the prioritization of multiple targets. However, in line with recent outcomes drawn from serial visual memory, this endogenously driven focus on high-reward items results in greater susceptibility to exogenous suffix interference, relative to low-reward items. This contrasts with outcomes from cueing paradigms, indicating that different methods of attentional direction may not always result in equivalent outcomes on working memory performance.

While most individuals who have problems acquiring new information forget at a normal rate, there have been reports of patients who show much more rapid forgetting, particularly comprising a subsample of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. Currently available tests are generally not designed to test this since it requires multiple different tests of the same material. We describe two tests that aim to fill this gap, one verbal, the Crimes Test, the other visual, the Four Doors Test. Each test involves four scenes comprising five features. In each case, this allows four tests of 20 different questions to be produced and used at four different delays. Two experiments were run, each comprising a multi-test condition in which immediate testing was followed by retesting after 24 h, one week and one month, and a second condition involving a single test after one month. Both the visual and verbal tests showed clear evidence of forgetting in the single test condition, together with little evidence of forgetting in the multi-test conditions. We suggest that the testing of individual features encourages participants to remember the whole episode which then acts as a further reminder. Further research is needed to decide whether this serendipitous lack of forgetting in healthy individuals (decelerated long-term forgetting) will provide an ideal test of accelerated long-term forgetting by avoiding the danger of floor effects, or whether it will simply prove to be a further complication. Theoretical implications are discussed, as well as possible ways ahead in further investigating the surprisingly neglected field of long-term forgetting.

A brief account is presented of the three-component working memory model proposed by Baddeley and Hitch. This is followed by an account of some of the problems it encountered in explaining how information from different subsystems with different codes could be combined, and how it was capable of communicating with long-term memory. In order to account for these, a fourth component was proposed, the episodic buffer. This was assumed to be a multidimensional store of limited capacity that can be accessed through conscious awareness. In an attempt to test and develop the concept, a series of experiments have explored the role of working memory in the binding of visual features into objects and verbal sequences into remembered sentences. The experiments use a dual task paradigm to investigate the role of the various subcomponents of working memory in binding. In contrast to our initial assumption, the episodic buffer appears to be a passive store, capable of storing bound features and making them available to conscious awareness, but not itself responsible for the process of binding.like André, I regard executive control as being at the heart of working memory (Vandierendonck, De Vooght & Van der Goten, 1998). I have however, always regarded analysing it as presenting a very tough problem. For many years I attempted to tackle the problem, by postulating a central executive that was capable of performing all of the many functions required by our multicomponent model, apart from those that could be assigned to the phonological loop or the visuo-spatial sketchpad. In short, the central executive was an allpowerful homunculus, a little man who ran the whole working memory show.This served the function of allowing us to concentrate on the more tractable questions of understanding the visuo-spatial and phonological subsystems, but was clearly not satisfactory. This became abundantly clear when, in writing my 1986 monograph, I reached the end of the first draft and realised that I had completely left out the central executive. Rather than starting again from scratch, I decided to borrow an attentional control model from elsewhere. But which model? This turned out not to be a problem since, although there were a number of models concerned with the attentional control of perception, we needed an action control mechanism. choosing a suitable model proved easy, as there only appeared to be one, that proposed by norman and Shallice (1986).

The term Bmodal model^reflects the importance of Atkinson and Shiffrin's paper in capturing the major developments in the cognitive psychology of memory that were achieved over the previous decade, providing an integrated framework that has formed the basis for many future developments. The fact that it is still the most cited model from that period some 50 years later has, we suggest, implications for the model itself and for theorising in psychology more generally. We review the essential foundations of the model before going on to discuss briefly the way in which one of its components, the short-term store, had influenced our own concept of a multicomponent working memory. This is followed by a discussion of recent claims that the concept of a short-term store be replaced by an interpretation in terms of activated long-term memory. We present several reasons to question these proposals. We conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of the longevity of the modal model for styles of theorising in cognitive psychology.

This is a repository copy of Can children prioritize more valuable information in working memory? An exploration into the effects of motivation and memory load.