Working memory encoding of attended information is adaptive to future relevance

Attention and working memory are thought to be closely linked, with the assumption that attended information can be remembered and reported within the time window of working memory. However, the phenomenon of attribute amnesia challenges this view by showing that participants fail to report a specific attended information (termed as the key feature), even though they had just used it for a task. Such observation raises questions about whether the report failure of key feature reflects a lack of working memory encoding for attended information. While previous studies have yielded contradictory results on this issue, the present study aimed to reconcile these seemingly conflicting findings by identifying future relevance as a critical factor driving the memory encoding of attended key features. The current results showed that when the key feature became irrelevant after being attended, it was not automatically encoded into working memory; however, when the key feature might become useful in future tasks, it was intentionally encoded into working memory. Overall, we concluded that the attended information could not automatically enter into working memory but would be actively encoded into working memory when expected to be useful in the future, supporting that working memory encoding is adaptive to future relevance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).