Longer free time between presentation of verbal list items often leads to better immediate serial recall. The present series of three experiments demonstrates that this beneficial effect of time is more general than has been known: It is found for verbal items presented visually and auditorily (Experiments 1 and 2), and also when people engage in…

Visual working memory (VWM) refers to the temporary storage and manipulation of visual information. Although visually different, objects we view and remember can share the same higher-level category information, such as an apple, orange, and banana all being classified as fruit. We study the influence of category information on VWM, focusing on…

Population coding models provide a quantitative account of visual working memory (VWM) retrieval errors with a plausible link to the response characteristics of sensory neurons. Recent work has provided an important new perspective linking population coding to variables of signal detection, including d-prime, and put forward a new hypothesis: that…

Working memory refers to the cognitive capacity to temporarily store and manipulate information from multiple sensory domains. Recent studies have shown that cognitive training can improve performance in both visual working memory and tactile working memory tasks. However, it is still unclear whether the effects of training can be transferred from…

Categories are fundamental to everyday life and the ability to learn new categories is relevant across the lifespan. Categories are ubiquitous across modalities, supporting complex processes such as object recognition and speech perception. Prior work has proposed that different categories may engage learning systems with unique developmental…

The retro-cue effect (RCE) describes the finding that participants' working memory performance is enhanced when their attention is directed to the to-be-tested position by a spatial cue during the retention interval. Here, we explore the relationship between RCE and working memory consolidation. A sequential display retro-cue paradigm is used for…

People vary in their performance on visual working memory tasks, and these individual differences covary with a wide range of higher-level cognitive processes including fluid intelligence. Performance also varies across study displays, purportedly driven by both low- and higher-level processes. Understanding what causes these sources of systematic…

Recent studies on visual working memory (VWM) have shown that visual information can be stored in VWM as continuous (e.g., a specific shade of red) as well as categorical representations (e.g., the general category red). It has been widely assumed, yet never directly tested, that continuous representations require more VWM mental effort than…

This study examined the effects of visual perception and executive function skills on the writing skills of Turkish students with learning disabilities and typically developing Turkish students. Given the unique features of the Turkish language, such as vowel harmony and articulatory structure, this research addresses a significant gap in…

This experiment employed viewing time methods to investigate the effects of individual differences in visuospatial working memory (VWM) on the processing of older adults' bridging inferences in the understanding of visual narratives. The results showed that older adults could make bridging inferences in visual narrative processing, and that VWM…

Studies examining visuospatial working memory (WM) in individuals with congenital deafness have yielded inconsistent results, and tactile WM has rarely been examined. The current study examined WM span tasks in the two modalities among 20 individuals with congenital deafness and 20 participants with typical hearing. The congenital deafness group…

While visual working memory has a short lifetime, residual representations can persist and disrupt currently maintained information. This phenomenon is known as proactive interference (PI), and the present study investigated whether the representations underpinning item-specific PI lose details over time. This would be expected if the memories…

Caregiver executive functions (EFs) play an integral role in shaping cognitive development. Here, we investigated how caregiver EF abilities (86 caregivers; "mean age" = 33.4 years, SD = 4.5) was associated with visual working memory (VWM) in infants (86 infants females; mean age = 250.6 days, SD = 35.8). The BRIEF-A was used to assess…

This work investigates how people make judgments about the content of their visual working memory (VWM). Some studies on long-term memory suggest that people base those metacognitive judgments on the outcome of a retrieval attempt. In contrast, Son and Metcalfe (2005) observed that people identify poorly remembered items immediately, presumably by…

Working memory is necessary for a wide variety of cognitive abilities. Developmental work has shown that as working memory capacities increase, so does the ability to successfully perform other cognitive tasks, including language processing. The present work demonstrates the effects of working memory availability on children's language production.…