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Description: Manipulating processing requirements induced by retrieval cues has a significant impact on memory recall. Although irrelevant information can be filtered out well at encoding, both ignoring irrelevant information and updating the contents of memory during the maintenance delay has a detrimental effect on recall. These effects are similar across the lifespan, but older individuals are particularly affected by manipulations of processing demands at encoding as well as increasing set size of information to be retained in memory. Finally, we find no systematic relationships between filtering performance at encoding, maintenance and retrieval suggesting that these processing demands are independent of each other. Rather than filtering being a single, monolithic entity, the data suggest that it is better accounted for as distinctly dissociable cognitive processes that engage and articulate with different phases of working memory.