Refreshing memory traces: thinking of an item improves retrieval from visual working memory

Abstract

This article provides evidence that refreshing, a hypothetical attention-based process operating in working memory (WM), improves the accessibility of visual representations for recall. "Thinking of", one of several concurrently active representations, is assumed to refresh its trace in WM, protecting the representation from being forgotten. The link between refreshing and WM performance, however, has only been tenuously supported by empirical evidence. Here, we controlled which and how often individual items were refreshed in a color reconstruction task by presenting cues prompting participants to think of specific WM items during the retention interval. We show that the frequency with which an item is refreshed improves recall of this item from visual WM. Our study establishes a role of refreshing in recall from visual WM and provides a new method for studying the impact of refreshing on the amount of information we can keep accessible for ongoing cognition.

Attentional refreshing of information in working memory: Increased immediate accessibility of just-refreshed representations

“…Souza et al (2015) have shown improvements of recall performance for colors that were refreshed more often, thereby providing direct evidence for the presumed final outcome of refreshing, i.e. less forgetting.…”

“…In the Empty delay condition, the four empty boxes with the fixation cross were presented on screen during the entire delay, regardless of its duration. In the Instructed-refreshing condition, the four empty boxes were highlighted at a rate of one box per second, in the order of presentation, after a brief delay of 1000 ms during which the four empty boxes were shown (see Souza et al, 2015, for a similar procedure). The trials of the different experimental conditions were presented in random order and participants performed Materials and Procedure: Experiment 2.…”

“…(2) We wanted to test whether evidence for spontaneous refreshing during list presentation would still be observed when refreshing is no longer facilitated by environmental support during list presentation and thus removed any environmental support during list presentation in Experiments 3 and 4. And finally, (3) in Experiments 1 and 2, there was a brief delay separating list presentation from the delay during which instructed refreshing took place (see Souza et al, 2015, for a similar procedure). This was not the case in the spontaneous-refreshing conditions and might have induced unintended differences between the spontaneous and the instructed conditions.…”

“…Highlighting consisted in the border line of a box becoming thicker and red. Participants were instructed "to think about the letter that was presented in that box" when a box was highlighted (see Souza et al, 2015, for similar instructions).…”

“…Bernardin, & Camos, 2004;Barrouillet, Bernardin, Portrat, Vergauwe, & Camos, 2007;Barrouillet, Portrat, & Camos, 2011;Camos & Portrat, 2015;Hudjetz & Oberauer, 2007;Ricker & Cowan, 2010;Vergauwe, Barrouillet, & Camos, 2009; but see Oberauer, Lewandowsky, Farrell, Jarrold, & Greaves, 2012;Oberauer & Lewandowsky, 2013), and (2) increasing the number of times a memory item has been refreshed, by presenting cues prompting participants to think of specific WM items during a retention interval, results in better memory performance for that item (Souza, Rerko, & Oberauer, 2015). In these studies, researchers have focused on the effects of refreshing on memory performance at the end of the trial or at the end of the experimental session.…”