Mızrak, E. and Oberauer, K. orcid.org/0000-0003-3902-7318 (2021) What is time good for in working memory? Psychological Science, 32 (8). pp. 1325-1337. ISSN 0956-7976
Abstract
Giving people more time to process information in working memory improves their performance on working memory tasks. It is often assumed that free time given after presentation of an item enables maintenance processes to counteract forgetting of this item, suggesting that time has a retroactive benefit. Two other hypotheses—short-term consolidation and temporal distinctiveness—entail a local effect of time on immediately preceding and following items. Here, we show instead a novel global and proactive benefit of time in working memory. In three serial-recall experiments (Ns = 21, 25, and 26 young adults, respectively), we varied the position and duration of the free time within a seven-item list of consonants. Experiment 1 showed that the effect is global and not local. Experiments 2a and 2b showed that increased interitem time benefited performance only for the subsequent items, implying a proactive benefit. This finding rules out maintenance processes, short-term consolidation, and temporal distinctiveness as explanations of the free-time benefit but is consistent with the proposal of a gradually recovering encoding resource.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2021. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | working memory; time; encoding resource account; proactive benefit; memory; open data; open materials |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > Department of Psychology (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 20 Jan 2023 12:47 |
Last Modified: | 20 Jan 2023 12:47 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797621996659 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/0956797621996659 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:195509 |