What about juggling words briefly helps us remember them later?
Words were remembered better later mainly when they had enjoyed more spare time in working memory, while making the distracting task harder or longer had no consistent long-term effect.
Source
How does Working Memory Promote Traces in Episodic Memory?
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Six within-subject complex-span experiments varying distractor cognitive load, number of distractors and/or free time, each followed by a delayed free-recall test; Bayesian analyses
- N
- N=144 · 24 participants in each of six separate experiments (one block missing for one participant in Experiment 5)
- Population
- University subject-pool participants tested in Fribourg (Italian words) and Essex (English words)
- Outcome
- Delayed free recall of words, overall and conditionalized on correct immediate serial recall; immediate recall and distractor response times as manipulation checks
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What they did
Across six experiments, 24 people per experiment saw lists of four words, each followed by a series of simple digit or location judgements (distractors), and then recalled the words in order straight away. After each block and a short filler task, they tried to recall all the words from that block in any order. The experiments varied how demanding the distractors were (a harder task or a faster pace), how many distractors followed each word, and how much free time followed each distractor. The authors also estimated how much free time each word had accumulated and related this to delayed recall.
What they found
Harder or faster distractors reliably hurt immediate recall in the first four experiments, but their effect on delayed recall was absent or ambiguous once differences in immediate recall were taken into account. The number of distractors mostly had no effect, apart from a benefit on conditionalized delayed recall in Experiment 4, which used stronger suppression of rehearsal. The best predictor of delayed recall was the free time a word had accumulated, which followed a logarithmic curve: extra time helped a lot early on and less as time built up. Surprisingly, directly manipulating free time in Experiments 5 and 6 did not produce a clear effect.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The free-time relationship is correlational: accumulated free time was estimated after the fact from response times, and when free time was manipulated directly it produced no clear effect, so the study cannot say free time causes better long-term memory. The three factors cannot be varied fully independently, because changing load or number of distractors automatically changes free time. Each experiment had only 24 participants, the experiments differed in language, rehearsal suppression and distractor counts, and none were pre-registered. The paper is a short report, so detailed statistics for each experiment are in figures and supplements rather than the text.
Key terms
- Complex span task
- A working-memory task in which items to remember alternate with a distracting processing task, followed by recall of the items in order.
- Cognitive load
- How much of the distractor period attention is captured by the distracting task, raised here by making the task harder or faster.
- Free time
- The time left over after responding to each distractor, during which attention could return to the words being remembered.
- Conditionalized delayed recall
- Later recall counted only for words that had been correctly recalled immediately, so that differences are not simply due to more initial retrieval practice.
- Episodic memory
- Long-term memory for specific events or items encountered at a particular time and place, here the words from earlier blocks.
- Bayes factor
- A ratio showing how much more likely the data are under one hypothesis than another; it can provide evidence for a null effect as well as against it.
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Quiz yourself
Which factor best accounted for delayed recall across the six experiments?
Common questions
Why look at delayed recall only for words recalled correctly the first time?
Easier conditions produce more correct immediate recall, and simply retrieving a word once can help later memory. Conditionalizing removes that head start so any remaining effect reflects what happened during working-memory processing.
If free time predicted recall, why did manipulating it not work?
The authors could not determine why. The correlational link may reflect something that goes along with free time rather than free time itself, or the manipulation may have weakened other effects, such as cognitive load, in those experiments.
Does this mean distractors do not matter for memory?
They clearly matter for immediate recall. The study suggests their long-term effects may be better explained by how much free time they leave, rather than by their difficulty or number as such.
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