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Unravelling the intersections between consolidation, refreshing, and removal

Working memory (WM) is the cognitive system whose limited capacity is responsible for temporarily holding, processing, and manipulating information in mind. WM capacity limits the complexity of the tasks we can perform, and how well we can reason. In recent years, researchers have been interested in uncovering how attention can serve the efficient allocation of WM capacity. At least three attentional processes have been put forward as crucial in attaining this goal: consolidation, refreshing, and removal. Consolidation is assumed to consist of the (shortterm) stabilization of a recently formed memory trace by directing attention to it even after the perceptual stimulus is no longer available.1,2 Refreshing, by contrast, has been defined as an attentional-based process that cycles over all working memory contents (not only the most recently acquired ones), thereby augmenting their accessibility in memory and preventing forgetting.3–6 Lastly, removal has been conceptualized as the active, controlled discarding of irrelevant or outdated information,7–9 thereby freeing capacity and preventing that relevant and irrelevant information interfere with each other in WM.10 The research domain concerned with these three processes has become increasingly popular, and new data are accumulating quickly. Studies have started to consider how these processes may contribute not only to WM performance in general, but also to individual differences in cognitive abilities11–13 to age-related WM decline,14–17 and how they might be implemented in computational models.9,18,19 These are exciting days for researchers interested in the interplay of attention in WM. Nonetheless, the three aforementioned attentional processes are still relatively ill-defined and not well understood, nor is the relationship between them. Furthermore, although each of these processes is assumed to fulfill a different role, they can yield similar behavioral predictions (e.g., see Refs. 1 and 20), which make it difficult to tease apart these attentional processes. Accordingly, whether an effect is ascribed to one or the other process can be more dependent on the theoretical orientation of the researchers conducting the study than on the data that the process is assumed to explain. This is an undesirable state of affairs for the scientific progress in the field. On the one hand, cognitive psychologists should strive to assume as few cognitive processes as possible to describe a given phenomenon. If any of the processes defined above are redundant, then we should remove them from the list of potential mechanisms affecting WM performance. On the other hand, if these processes are not redundant, then we need to better understand their exact contribution, and potential interaction, in different cognitive tasks. Given this state of affairs, we felt the time was right to bring some more perspective into these topics. Our ultimate wish was to bring researchers to refine their theoretical concepts of consolidation, refreshing, and removal, to agree on the descriptions of their exact mechanisms in WM thereby facilitating the future implementation of these processes in computational models, and, ultimately, to derive testable predictions to disentangle their contributions to the efficient allocation of WM capacity.