What is the time course of working memory attentional refreshing?

Benoît Lemaire, Aurore Pageot, Gaën Plancher, Sophie Portrat

One way of maintaining information in working memory is through attentional refreshing, a process that was recently shown to be independent from verbal rehearsal. In the classical working memory complex span task, the usual assumption is that memoranda are refreshed in a cumulative fashion, starting from the first item, going in a forward order until the latest one, and cycling until there is no time to continue the process. However, there is no evidence that refreshing operates in that way. The present study proposes a computational modelling study, which constitutes a powerful method to investigate alternative hypotheses. Different refreshing schedules are investigated within computational implementation of the time-based resource sharing model. Their ability to fit three sets of behavioral data and to reproduce the major time-based resource sharing predictions were evaluated using standard model selection criteria. Besides an already published schedule in which the attentional focus is expanded, it appeared that one schedule, the least-activated-first, outperforms the classical cumulative one. The memory trace refreshed at a given time is the one that is the least activated in working memory at that time. These findings characterized the time course of attentional refreshing in working memory and specified the contribution of refreshing to primacy and recency effects. Moreover, in the light of various fields of cognitive psychology, we propose that such refreshing schedules can operate without a homunculus within a general framework including cognitive control and strategic considerations.