Candice C Morey

• PhD, University of Missouri
• Reader at Cardiff University

Few studies have examined whether semantic relatedness between objects can influence object grouping, thereby optimizing the efficiency of visual working memory (WM). Moreover, these studies have largely used real-world grayscale objects. Here, we sought to determine whether and how sharing object semantics and colors would benefit WM. Participants...

Working memory is a cognitive system that enables the temporary retention (usually a few seconds) of a limited amount of information. However, recent evidence has posed challenges to the conventional understanding of working memory's persistence. Chen et al. (Psychological Science, 29(4), 645-655, 2018) demonstrated that participants can easily mak...

Visuo-spatial bootstrapping refers to the well-replicated phenomena in which serial recall in a purely verbal task is boosted by presenting digits within the familiar spatial layout of a typical telephone keypad. The visuo-spatial bootstrapping phenomena indicates that additional support comes from long-term knowledge of a fixed spatial pattern, an...

Though verbal rehearsal is a frequently endorsed strategy for remem�bering short lists among adults, there is ambiguity around when children deploy it, and what circumstantial factors encourage them to rehearse. We recoded data from a recent multilab replication of a serial picture memory task in which children were observed for evidence of tas...

Consistent semantic relations among real-world objects can boost visual working memory. However, previous studies have only used objects in greyscale. We sought to study whether and how there are bonuses of color- and semantic-sharing between objects. Participants viewed scenes including either one semantically-related and/or perceptually-similar o...

The current study investigated the effects of metacognitive and executive function (EF) training on childhood EF (inhibition, working memory [WM], cognitive flexibility, and proactive/reactive control) and academic skills (reading, reasoning, and math) among children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Children (N = 134, Mage = 8.70 years) were assigne...

Visuospatial bootstrapping (VSB) refers to the phenomenon in which performance on a verbal working memory task can be enhanced by presenting the verbal material within a familiar visuospatial configuration. This effect is part of a broader literature concerning how working memory is influenced by use of multimodal codes and contributions from long-...

The capacity limitations of visual working memory may be bypassed by verbal labeling. In adults, labeling increases estimates of both quantity and quality of visual working memory. However, we do not know when children begin to use labeling and whether labeling similarly benefits visual memories of children under and over age 7. We assessed whether...

A recent Registered Replication Report (RRR) of the development of verbal rehearsal during serial recall revealed that children verbalized at younger ages than previously thought, but did not identify sources of individual differences. Here, we use mediation analysis to reanalyze data from the 934 children ranging from 5 to 10 years old from the RR...

Previous studies have demonstrated that when presented with a display of spatially arranged letters, participants seem to remember the letters’ locations when letters are the focus of a recognition test, but do not remember letters’ identity when locations are tested. This strong binding asymmetry suggests that encoding location may be obligatory w...

Consistent semantic relations among objects (e.g., a toothbrush near a toothpaste) have been found to boost visual short-term memory. Perceptual similarity, particularly shared color, also benefits short-term memory for single-feature objects. This color-sharing bonus can be explained by a compression process that compacts redundant information to...

Previous work with complex memory span tasks, in which simple choice decisions are imposed between presentations of to-be-remembered items, shows that these secondary tasks reduce memory span. It is less clear how reconfiguring and maintaining various amounts of information affects decision speeds. We introduced preliminary "lead-in" decisions and...

An ongoing major debate centers around whether multi-tasking in working memory, that is, performing several mental activities at once, is supported by multiple specialized domain-specific or by a single-purpose domain-general cognitive resources. Working memory theories differ in their explanations and predictions about when performing two mental t...

Work by Flavell, Beach, and Chinsky indicated a change in the spontaneous production of overt verbalization behaviors when comparing young children (age 5) with older children (age 10). Despite the critical role that this evidence of a change in verbalization behaviors plays in modern theories of cognitive development and working memory, there has...

In the embedded-processes model, working memory is represented as a two-phase process with the activated portion of long-term memory holding features temporarily, including newly learned information and, within it, the focus of attention holding up to several integrated items or chunks. This chapter focuses on the motivation to use the structure of...

Working memory (WM), a key feature of the cognitive system, allows for maintaining and processing information simultaneously and in a controlled manner. WM processing continuously develops across childhood, with significant increases both in verbal and visuospatial WM. Verbal and visuospatial WM may show different developmental trajectories, as ver...

As children become older, they better maintain task-relevant information in preparation of upcoming cognitive demands. This is referred to as proactive control, which is a key component of cognitive control development. However, it is still uncertain whether children engage in proactive control consistently across different contexts and how proacti...

Breaches of cyber-security often arise unintentionally from the human user such as when switching between subtasks or external interruptions, disrupting the flow of work and leading to action slips in the execution of a task procedure [1, 2]. There has been little research into the perceived effects of task interruption and switching on computer-ba...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

We present a consensus-based checklist to improve and document the transparency of research reports in social and behavioural research. An accompanying online application allows users to complete the form and generate a report that they can submit with their manuscript or post to a public repository.

Reports of rare patients who seem to lack the ability to retain certain types of information across brief delays have long sustained the popular idea that newly-perceived verbal, visual, and spatial information is initially recorded in separate, specialized short-term memory buffers. However, evidence from these same cases includes puzzling details...

Reports of rare patients who seem to lack the ability to retain certain types of information across brief delays have long sustained the popular idea that newly-perceived verbal, visual, and spatial information is initially recorded in separate, specialized short-term memory buffers. However, evidence from these same cases includes puzzling details...

Consistent, robust boosts to visual working memory capacity are observed when colour–location arrays contain duplicate colours. The prevailing explanation suggests that duplicated colours are encoded as one perceptual group. If so, then we should observe not only higher working memory capacity overall for displays containing duplicates, but specifi...

We respond to the comments of Logie and Vandierendonck to our article proposing benchmark findings for evaluating theories and models of short-term and working memory. The response focuses on the two main points of criticism: (a) Logie and Vandierendonck argue that the scope of the set of benchmarks is too narrow. We explain why findings on how wor...

Any mature field of research in psychology-such as short-term/working memory-is characterized by a wealth of empirical findings. It is currently unrealistic to expect a theory to explain them all; theorists must satisfice with explaining a subset of findings. The aim of the present article is to make the choice of that subset less arbitrary and idi...

We describe three mechanisms—consolidation, refreshing, and removal—as processes that may serve to strengthen new memories. We detail their explicit and implied differences and similarities, and highlight points upon which theorists disagree about their supposed characteristics. We consider the challenges remaining in refining definitions of these...

The dominant paradigm for understanding working memory, or the combination of the perceptual, attentional, and mnemonic processes needed for thinking, subdivides short-term memory (STM) according to whether memoranda are encoded in aural-verbal or visual formats. This traditional dissociation has been supported by examples of neuropsychological pat...

Visuospatial bootstrapping (VSB) occurs when memory for verbal material is enhanced via association with meaningful visuospatial information. Sequences of digits are visually presented either in the center of the screen or within a keypad layout in which the digits may be arranged identically to familiar pin pad and mobile phone layouts, or randoml...

Examining the impact of maintenance on processing speed allows us to test whether storage and processing resources are shared. Comparing these relationships in children of different ages allows further insight into whether one or multiple resources for these operations must be assumed and whether remembering is proactive throughout childhood. We te...

The emergence of strategic verbal rehearsal at around 7 years of age is widely considered a major milestone in descriptions of the development of short-term memory across childhood. Likewise, rehearsal is believed by many to be a crucial factor in explaining why memory improves with age. This apparent qualitative shift in mnemonic processes has als...

Previous studies on directed forgetting in visual working memory (VWM) have shown that, if people are cued to remember only a subset of the items currently held in VWM, they will completely forget the uncued, no longer relevant items. While this finding is indicative of selective remembering, it remains unclear whether directed forgetting can also...

Evidence suggests that there is a tendency to verbally recode visually-presented information, and that in some cases verbal recoding can boost memory performance. According to multi-component models of working memory, memory performance is increased because task-relevant information is simultaneously maintained in two codes. The possibility of dual...

Among models of working memory, there is not yet a consensus about how to describe functions specific to storing verbal or visual-spatial memories. We presented aural-verbal and visual-spatial lists simultaneously and sometimes cued one type of information after presentation, comparing accuracy in conditions with and without informative retro-cues....

Openness is one of the central values of science. Open scientific practices such as sharing data, materials, and analysis scripts alongside published articles have many benefits, including easier replication and extension studies, increased availability of data for theory-building and meta-analysis, and increased possibility of review and collabora...

Color repetitions in a visual scene boost working memory capacity for its elements, a phenomenon known as the color-sharing effect. This may occur because improved perceptual organization reduces information load or because the repetitions capture attention. The implications of these explanations differ drastically for both the theoretical meaning...

Selective attention and working memory capacity (WMC) are related constructs, but debate about the manner in which they are related remains active. One elegant explanation of variance in WMC is that the efficiency of filtering irrelevant information is the crucial determining factor, rather than differences in capacity per se. We examined this hypo...

As a commonly used measure of selective attention, it is important to understand the factors contributing to interference in the Stroop task. The current research examined distracting stimuli in the auditory and visual modalities to determine whether the use of auditory distractors would create additional interference, beyond what is typically obse...

Working Memory Capacity (WMC) is thought to be related to executive control and focused memory search abilities. These two hypotheses make contrasting predictions regarding the effects of retrieval on forgetting. Executive control during memory retrieval is believed to lead to retrieval induced forgetting (RIFO) because inhibition of competing memo...

Percentage correctly recalled items per condition with standard deviations. (DOCX)

Raw Pearson 2-tailed correlations between RIFO and WMC scores (N = 125). * Significant value p<.05. (DOCX)

Words used in the experiment. (DOCX)

Retrieval induced effects for high and low working memory capacity individuals. (A) RIFO scores were calculated by subtracting average performance of DS RP−, OS NRP and OS RP− from DS NRP performance. (B) RIFA scores were calculated by subtracting average performance of DS NRP from OS RP+ and DS RP+ performance. The * and NS show the results of the...

As the number of studies showing that items can be retained as bound representations in memory increases, researchers are beginning to investigate how the different features are bound together. In the present study, we examined the relative importances of the verbal and spatial features in serial memory for visual stimuli. Participants were asked t...

The role of attention in visual memory remains controversial; while some evidence has suggested that memory for binding between features demands no more attention than does memory for the same features, other evidence has indicated cognitive costs or mnemonic benefits for explicitly attending to bindings. We attempted to reconcile these findings by...

Relationships between Stroop interference and working memory capacity may reflect individual differences in resolving conflict, susceptibility to goal neglect, or both of these factors. We compared relationships between working memory capacity and three Stroop tasks: a classic, printed color-word Stroop task, a cross-modal Stroop, and a new version...

It is known that visual working memory capacity is limited, but the nature of this limit remains a subject of controversy. Increasingly, two factors are thought to limit visual memory: an object-based limit associated with so-called "slots" models, and an information-based limit associated with resource models. Recently, Barton, Ester, and Awh (200...

Some evidence suggests that memory for serial order is domain-general. Evidence also points to asymmetries in interference between verbal and visual-spatial tasks. We confirm that concurrently remembering verbal and spatial serial lists provokes substantial interference compared with remembering a single list, but we further investigate the impact...

The change detection paradigm has become an important tool for researchers studying working memory. Change detection is especially useful for studying visual working memory, because recall paradigms are difficult to employ in the visual modality. Pashler (Perception & Psychophysics, 44, 369-378, 1988) and Cowan (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24, 8...

Prominent roles for general attention resources are posited in many models of working memory, but the manner in which these can be allocated differs between models or is not sufficiently specified. We varied the payoffs for correct responses in two temporally-overlapping recognition tasks, a visual array comparison task and a tone sequence comparis...

Although the measurement of working memory capacity is crucial to understanding working memory and its interaction with other cognitive faculties, there are inconsistencies in the literature on how to measure capacity. We address the measurement in the change detection paradigm, popularized by Luck and Vogel (Nature, 390, 279-281, 1997). Two measur...

If working memory (WM) depends on a central resource-as is posited in some theories, but not in others-it should be possible to observe interference between tasks that share few features with each other. We investigated whether interference with WM for visual arrays would occur, even if the interfering task required neither visual processing nor ov...

Previous studies have indicated that visual working memory performance increases with age in childhood, but it is not clear why. One main hypothesis has been that younger children are less efficient in their attention; specifically, they are less able to exclude irrelevant items from working memory to make room for relevant items. We examined this...

Working-memory theories often include domain-specific verbal and visual stores (e.g., the phonological and visuospatial buffers of Baddeley, 1986), and some also posit more general stores thought to be capable of holding verbal or visuospatial materials (Baddeley, 2000; Cowan, 2005). However, it is currently unclear which type of store is primarily...

We review the evidence for various kinds of limit in the capability of working memory, the small amount of information that can be held in mind at once. To distinguish between types of limit in working memory, we invoke metaphors of space (capacity), time (decay and speed), and energy (control of attention). The review focuses primarily on recent e...

Visual working memory is often modeled as having a fixed number of slots. We test this model by assessing the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) of participants in a visual-working-memory change-detection task. ROC plots yielded straight lines with a slope of 1.0, a tell-tale characteristic of all-or-none mnemonic representations. Formal mode...

Abstract We sketch our recent research leading towarda revision of the concept of working memory capacity. This includes a rationale for believing that working memory,capacity is a fundamental ability, and for estimating working memory based on the number of independent chunks of information recalled. We provide evidence that the often-noted relati...

This chapter begins by discussing a simple answer to the question of what primary memory capacity is: that primary memory can hold seven chunks or meaningful units. This answer was shown to have some basis in the facts, but overall it was shown not to be a general rule, and therefore was said to be a legend. However, it should be said that simple a...

Verbal-to-spatial associations in working memory may index a core capacity for abstract information limited in the amount concurrently retained. However, what look like associative, abstract representations could instead reflect verbal and spatial codes held separately and then used in parallel. We investigated this issue in two experiments on memo...

Working memory holds information actively being used in cognitive performance. Two important aspects of working memory are how many items it can hold, and how efficiently it can be used. Recently, Vogel and colleagues used event-related brain potentials to show that these two things are related. People who could remember more objects from a spatial...

Working memory (WM) is the set of mental processes holding limited information in a temporarily accessible state in service of cognition. We provide a theoretical framework to understand the relation between WM and aptitude measures. The WM measures that have yielded high correlations with aptitudes include separate storage-and-processing task comp...

Examinations of interference between verbal and visual materials in working memory have produced mixed results. If there is a central form of storage (e.g., the focus of attention; N. Cowan, 2001), then cross-domain interference should be obtained. The authors examined this question with a visual-array comparison task (S. J. Luck & E. K. Vogel, 199...

Recently, investigators have suggested that visual working memory operates in a manner unaffected by the retention of verbal material. We question that conclusion on the basis of a simple dual-task experiment designed to rule out phonological memory and to identify a more central faculty as the source of a shared limitation. With a visual working m...

Typescript. Thesis (M.S.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 45-46).