Working memory limits severely constrain long-term retention

Forsberg, Alicia, Guitard, Dominic and Cowan, Nelson 2021. Working memory limits severely constrain long-term retention. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 28 (2) , pp. 537-547. 10.3758/s13423-020-01847-z

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

There has been considerable controversy in recent years as to whether information held in working memory (WM) is rapidly forgotten or automatically transferred to long-term memory (LTM). Although visual WM capacity is very limited, we appear able to store a virtually infinite amount of information in visual LTM. Still, LTM retrieval often fails. Some view visual WM as a mental sketchpad that is wiped clean when new information enters, but not a consistent precursor of LTM. Others view the WM and LTM systems as inherently linked. Distinguishing between these possibilities has been difficult, as attempts to directly manipulate the active holding of information in visual WM has typically introduced various confounds. Here, we capitalized on the WM system’s capacity limitation to control the likelihood that visual information was actively held in WM. Our young-adult participants (N = 103) performed a WM task with unique everyday items, presented in groups of two, four, six, or eight items. Presentation time was adjusted according to the number of items. Subsequently, we tested participants’ LTM for items from the WM task. LTM was better for items presented originally within smaller WM set sizes, indicating that WM limitations contribute to subsequent LTM failures, and that holding items in WM enhances LTM encoding. Our results suggest that a limit in WM capacity contributes to an LTM encoding bottleneck for trial-unique familiar objects, with a relatively large effect size.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology
Publisher:	Springer
ISSN:	1069-9384
Date of Acceptance:	9 November 2020
Last Modified:	09 Nov 2022 12:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/153406

Citation Data

Cited 14 times in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item