Rapid source forgetting across modalities: A problem for working memory models

Working memory is a cognitive system that enables the temporary retention (usually a few seconds) of a limited amount of information. However, recent evidence has posed challenges to the conventional understanding of working memory's persistence. Chen et al. (Psychological Science, 29(4), 645-655, 2018) demonstrated that participants can easily make judgments using a stimulus's identity but cannot recall from which source the information came (presented either as a written word or a color patch) just milliseconds earlier. This "Source Amnesia" carries substantial implications for working memory models but has yet to be explored within the realm of verbal information. We fill this gap by investigating the robustness and generalizability of this rapid forgetting phenomenon. We first replicate the observed effect within the visual domain (Experiment 1) and subsequently extend it to the verbal domain (Experiment 2). Finally, we test the idea that participants may instead encode a positional context (Experiment 3), in line with the Interference model (Oberauer & Lin, Psychological Review, 124(1), 21, 2017). Aligning with the work of Chen et al. (Psychological Science, 29(4), 645-655, 2018), our results consistently reveal a pronounced tendency for rapid forgetting, for both visual and verbal information regardless of whether the information is elicited for recall by format or position cues. The theoretical implications of these findings for current memory models are discussed.