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Category: Project

Description: Working memory (WM) is a limited-capacity system requiring an interference-control process to avoid being cluttered from irrelevant information. Recently, it has been suggested that this “housekeeping” mechanism can be attributed to an item-wise removal process serving to actively remove irrelevant information from WM. It has been theorized that this active removal process serves to facilitate both WM maintenance in the face of distraction as well as the updating of outdated information. An alternate view, however, is that interference control in WM relies on an inhibitory process that suppresses the activation of distractors against competing, task-relevant representations. This study is the first to assess the extent to which removal and inhibition represent the same cognitive process. One-hundred and thirty-eight undergraduate students from the University of Western Australia (M = 20.42, SD = 3.09) completed a novel removal task battery in addition to an inhibition task battery. Data were analysed using a hybrid path analytic and structural equation model. The modelling found that there was unique variance associated with the removal latent variable, and estimated that only approximately 9 % of the variance in the removal latent variable could be accounted for by the inhibition tasks, providing tentative support that removal should not be considered a process of cognitive inhibition. The findings support previous claims that removal is an independent WM updating process. The findings are also consistent with a class of computational WM models proposing that removal and inhibition operate on different levels.