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The inhibition of return effect in perception refers to the observation that one is slower to re-attend a location that was attended right before, compared to a location that was not attended right before. Johnson et al. (2013, Psych. Sc., 24, 1104-1112, doi:10.1177/0956797612466414) observed a similar inhibitory effect for an attended item in working memory, which the authors referred to as an inhibition-of-return-like effect . However, testing an inhibition of return effect requires attention to be disengaged from the attended item, before testing whether participants are slower to return to said item. This was assumed but not experimentally manipulated in the paradigm by Johnson and colleagues. In the current study, we investigated whether an inhibition of return effect can be observed in working memory when attention is experimentally disengaged from the attended item before measuring whether responses are slower for the item in question. Participants were indeed slower to respond to a memory probe that matched the item that was attended right before, compared to a memory probe that matched the item that was not attended right before. Thus, our test with more experimental control did result in an inhibition of return effect in working memory., Competing Interests: The authors have no competing interests to declare., (Copyright: © 2024 The Author(s).)

The other-race effect is the observation that faces from another ethnicity induce worst recall performance than faces from one's own ethnicity. This effect has been defined as a type of familiarity effect, with more familiar faces better recalled than less familiar faces. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that a working memory maintenance mechanism called attentional refreshing mediates the other-race effect and that faces from one's own ethnicity are refreshed more efficiently than faces from other ethnicities. In two experiments, face ethnicity was orthogonally manipulated with cognitive load of a concurrent processing task in a complex-span paradigm (Exp. 1) and with the memory load in a Brown-Peterson paradigm (Exp. 2). Both cognitive and memory load effects are indices of the functioning of attentional refreshing. Testing Caucasian young adults, Caucasian and East-Asian faces were contrasted. Results from both experiments were congruent and against our initial hypothesis. The other-race effect in working memory does not appear to be supported by attentional refreshing. Furthermore, the results are congruent with the idea that faces as a whole are not maintained in working memory via attentional refreshing., Competing Interests: The authors have no competing interests to declare., (Copyright: © 2023 The Author(s).)

The transition to web-testing , although promising, entails many new concerns. Web-testing is harder to monitor, so researchers need to ensure that the quality of the data collected is comparable to the quality of data typically achieved by lab-testing . Our study yields a novel contribution to this issue, by being the first to distinguish between the impact of web-testing and the impact of sourcing individuals from different participant pools, including crowdsourcing platforms. We presented a fairly general working memory task to 196 MTurk participants, 300 Prolific participants, and 255 students from the University of Geneva, allowing for a comparison of data quality across different participant pools. Among university students, 215 were web-tested, and 40 were lab-tested, allowing for a comparison of testing modalities within the same participant pool. Data quality was measured by assessing multiple data characteristics (i.e., reaction time, accuracy, anomalous values) and the presence of two behavioral benchmark effects. Our results revealed that who you test (i.e., participant pool) is more important than how you test (i.e., testing modality). Concerning how you test , our results showed that web-testing incurs a small, yet acceptable loss of data quality compared to lab-testing. Concerning who you test , Prolific participants were almost indistinguishable from web-tested students, but MTurk participants differed drastically from the other pools. Our results therefore encourage the use of web-testing in the domain of cognitive psychology, even when using complex paradigms. Nevertheless, these results urge for caution regarding how researchers select web-based participant pools when conducting online research., Competing Interests: The authors have no competing interests to declare., (Copyright: © 2023 The Author(s).)

Working memory is a cognitive system responsible for maintaining information. It is often assumed to contain different states of accessibility of information, which is highest for an item held in the focus of attention. Evidence for this heightened accessibility usually comes from item-recognition tasks, in which a memory list is followed by a probe to be judged as being present in or absent from the list. Probes corresponding to the last-presented list item are usually recognized faster than probes corresponding to any other list item (i.e., the last-presented benefit), an effect that is often explained by the last-presented item being in the focus of attention. The last-presented benefit usually disappears when a long retention interval is inserted between the presentation of the list items and the probe. This raises the question of how long the last-presented item remains in the focus of attention. The present study gradually manipulates the retention interval between the presentation of the list of items and the probe in an item-recognition task in order to pinpoint when the focus of attention switches away from the last-presented list item. The results show that the last-presented benefit decreases over time when the retention interval is gradually extended from 0 ms to 200 ms, 400 ms and 500 ms, and completely disappears as of 750 ms. The cognitive mechanisms that may be involved in the time course of the last-presented benefit are discussed., (Copyright: © 2021 The Author(s).)

Working memory performance is impaired when an attention-demanding task is executed during memory retention. The cognitive load effect is the consistent finding that the size of the memory impairment is determined by the relative amount of time that the secondary processing task occupies attention during memory retention. Cognitive load has been proposed to be a Priority-A benchmark any model of working memory should be able to explain (Oberauer et al., 2018), in part because the effect appears to generalize across different experimental procedures and materials. Using a standard dual-task procedure, we detail four experiments using a visual working memory recall task, two requiring memory for low-level features and two requiring memory for canonical angles (up, down, left, right, etc.). In all four experiments, we failed to find a cognitive load effect, calling into question the generality of the cognitive load effect and whether it is driving forgetting in multitasking contexts., Competing Interests: The authors have no competing interests to declare., (Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s).)

This study tests an important and appealing hypothesis that has been around in the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience for over 40 years, but that lacks a conclusive empirical test. According to this hypothesis, there is a direct relationship between speed and capacity in working memory. Working memory refers to the ability to retain a small amount of information in a highly accessible state for a short period of time. Across different fields, it has been proposed that the limited capacity of working memory can be understood in terms of time instead of space, such that the amount of information that can be actively maintained corresponds to the amount of information through which one can cycle in a constant and relatively short time-window. Here, we present a study that explicitly and directly tests the speed-capacity hypothesis. In particular, we test (1) the speed-capacity hypothesis in verbal working memory, (2) the speed-capacity hypothesis in visuospatial working memory, and most importantly, (3) whether the same speed-capacity relation holds across verbal and visuospatial working memory, reflecting a domain-general, time-based law of human working memory capacity and, as such, of the complexity of human thought. Overall, our results do not provide any evidence for the existence of a domain-general law. However, unexpected findings related to measuring memory speed (i.e., high prevalence of negative search slopes in the Sternberg task) prevent us from drawing firm conclusions., Competing Interests: EV is on the editorial board of the Journal of Cognition, a voluntary position. KU does not have any competing interests., (Copyright: © 2019 The Author(s).)