Evidence shows that visual working memory (VWM) is strongly served by attentional mechanisms, whereas other evidence shows that VWM representations readily survive when attention is being taken away. To reconcile these findings, we tested the hypothesis that directing attention away makes a memory representation vulnerable to interference from the…

The congruency effect in distracter interference tasks is often reduced after incongruent relative to congruent trials. Moreover, this "congruency sequence effect" (CSE) is influenced by learning related to concrete stimulus and response features as well as by learning related to abstract cognitive control processes. There is an ongoing…

Recent research suggests that human memory systems evolved to remember animate things better than inanimate things. In the present experiments, we examined whether these effects occur for both free recall and cued recall. In Experiment 1, we directly compared the effect of animacy on free recall and cued recall. Participants studied lists of…

Humans are characterized by an especially highly developed ability to use instructions to prepare toward upcoming events; yet, it is unclear just how powerful instructions can be. Although prior work provides evidence that instructions can be sufficiently powerful to proactively program working memory to execute stimulus-response (S-R)…

It is well established that a task-irrelevant sound (deviant sound) departing from an otherwise repetitive sequence of sounds (standard sounds) elicits an involuntary capture of attention and orienting response toward the deviant stimulus, resulting in the lengthening of response times in an ongoing task. Some have argued that this type of…