Long-Term Effects of Working Memory Retrieval from Prioritized and Deprioritized States
Which factors determine whether information held in working memory (WM) is transferred to long-term-memory (LTM)? Our present study draws inspiration from the established finding that retrieving (“testing”) memories from LTM benefits their future recall. Here, we examined the extent to which such LTM benefit may also occur after retrieval from WM, depending on whether the WM contents were retrieved from a prioritized or deprioritized state. To this end, we combined variants of a novel visual WM paradigm with a subsequent surprise LTM recall test. We found a WM-testing benefit both for prioritized and deprioritized material, which, interestingly, was stronger for temporally deprioritized WM information. This effect replicated across experiments with different priority manipulations. Subsequent LTM benefits generally occurred after free recall, but not after (forced-choice) discrimination of the WM contents. The surprisingly larger LTM benefit for deprioritized WM contents may reflect enhanced encoding of the participants’ own WM report into LTM.