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Refreshing boosts memory but does not protect it against interference.

Caro Hautekiet1,2, Evie Vergauwe3, Alessandra S Souza4

  • 1Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland. c.h.hautekiet@vu.nl.

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|February 17, 2026
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Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Refreshing items in working memory improves recall but does not protect against interference. Repeatedly focusing attention on a memory strengthens it, but interruptions still impair performance.

Keywords:
AttentionFocus of attentionInterferenceRefreshingWorking memory

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Memory Research

Background:

  • Focused attention enhances memory retrieval, with repeated attention (refreshing) cumulatively improving recall.
  • It remains unclear if refreshing working memory representations also increases their resistance to interference.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether refreshing memory representations enhances their robustness against interference.
  • To determine if the protective effect of refreshing against interference changes with the frequency of refreshing.

Main Methods:

  • Participants memorized colors and were instructed to refresh some items multiple times during a retention interval.
  • An auditory or visual interruption task was introduced to assess interference effects.
  • Memory performance was evaluated using a continuous reproduction test under varying refreshing frequencies and interruption conditions.

Main Results:

  • Memory performance was negatively impacted by the interruption task in both experiments.
  • Increasing the frequency of refreshing improved memory performance.
  • There was no interaction between refreshing frequency and the interruption task, indicating no reduced interference from refreshing.

Conclusions:

  • Refreshing strengthens memory representations, leading to better recall.
  • Refreshing does not confer increased protection against interference from subsequent tasks.
  • Working memory accessibility is improved by refreshing, but not its resilience to disruption.