Critical Review of Where Working Memory Meets Long-Term Memory

     Loaiza & Halse (2018) answer the primary research questions that answer questions, “How do humans maintain relevant information from moment to moment, and how may these underlying processes affect retention long after that information has left immediate awareness?” (p. 1455). The colleagues, through those questions, explore the intersection of working memory and long-term memory. The authors note that studies have increasingly investigated refreshing concerning attention to memoranda. Loaiza & Halse do a considerable review of the existing literature.

            In their investigation, the researchers investigated the intersection of working memory and long-term memory in three experiments. In these experiments, the researchers manipulated the list length and several distractors “following the memoranda in a Brown-Peterson-like-span task” (p.1455).  The first experiment used thirty-one participants who had provided informed consent and debriefed at the end of the investigation. The experiment’s design was such that it “manipulated the number of words to recall… and the number of distractors following the word” (p.1459). Experiment 3 had thirty participants and, besides, explored “performance as a function of serial position” (p. 1461). The third experiment also had thirty participants, and the results replicated those of the previous two. It was established that “list length never moderated

the beneficial effect of distractors on FFR across all three experiments” (1467).

            The findings of these studies are admissible, given that the researchers build upon the existing literature. For instance, this study also involved extrapolating Loaiza and McCabe’s 2012 study. While the results seem conflicting with previous observations, “that list length may have diminished the efficiency of retrieval” (p.1467), the research is about providing a theoretically meaningful factor.

Reference

Loaiza, V., & Halse, S. (2019). Where working memory meets long-term memory: The interplay of list length and distractors on memory performance. Journal Of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, And Cognition, 45(8), 1455-1472. Doi: 10.1037/xlm0000652