Using More Ecological Paradigms to Investigate Working Memory: Strengths, Limitations and Recommendations.

Forgetting at Short Term: When do Event-Based Interference and Temporal Factors Have an Effect?

International audience; Memory tasks combining storage and distracting tasks performed at either encoding or retrieval have provided divergent results pointing towards accounts of forgetting in terms of either temporal decay or event-based interference respectively. The aim of this study was to shed light on the possible sources of such a divergence that could rely on methodological aspects or deeper differences in the memory traces elicited by the different paradigms used. Methodological issues were explored in a first series of experiments by introducing at retrieval computer-paced distracting tasks that involved articulatory suppression, attentional demand, or both. A second series of ex…