Role of attention in the associative relatedness effect in verbal working memory: Behavioral and chronometric perspectives.

Long-term semantic memory (LTM) is known for affecting recall during working memory (WM) tasks. However, the way LTM intervenes in WM remains unknown. Moreover, the available findings are incongruent concerning how attention modulates the impact of LTM on WM. To examine this issue, the involvement of LTM representations in a complex span task was manipulated through variations of the associative relatedness of memory items, while the attentional demand of the concurrent task was varied. Children and young adults were also compared, because children are less efficient in using refreshing for maintenance than adults. Despite the impact of the three main factors on recall performance, which was better for related than unrelated words, with the low rather than the high demanding concurrent task and for adults than children, there was no interaction between associative relatedness and attentional demand, neither in children nor in adults. We replicated these results in a second experiment with a more attention-demanding concurrent task. Moreover, analyses of recall latency showed that adults were faster than children at recalling words and both age groups were faster for related (vs. unrelated) words, but there was no effect of the concurrent attentional demand on recall latency and no interaction. Finally, errors were mostly omissions and transpositions, both more prevalent under high concurrent attentional demand. The present findings suggest that the availability of attention does not modulate the effect of LTM on WM. We discuss how WM models can account for this finding and how LTM can act on WM functioning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Does semantic long-term memory impact refreshing in verbal working memory?

Attentional refreshing allows the maintenance of information in working memory and has received growing interest in recent years. However, it is still ill-defined and several proposals have been put forward to account for its functioning. Among them, some proposals suggest that refreshing relies on the retrieval of knowledge from semantic long-term memory. To examine such a proposal, the present study examined the impact on refreshing of two effects known to affect the retrieval from semantic long-term memory: word frequency and lexicality. In working memory span tasks, participants had to maintain memoranda varying in either frequency, or lexicality while performing concurrent tasks. By examining recall performance in complex span tasks and response times for the concurrent task in Brown-Peterson tasks, the present study provided evidence that long-term memory effects (a) affected recall without interacting with manipulation of refreshing and (b) did not affect refreshing speed. These findings challenge the idea that refreshing acts through the retrieval of knowledge from semantic long-term memory. Different WM models are discussed to account for these findings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).