Is Rehearsal an Effective Maintenance Strategy for Working Memory?

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2019.06.002

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Volume 23, Issue 9, September 2019, Pages 798-809

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2019.06.002 Get rights and content

Highlights

•
Most theories of working memory assume that some form of rehearsal process is necessary to temporarily maintain information.
•
Recent research has expanded the suite of proposed rehearsal processes, including articulatory rehearsal, refreshing, and elaboration.
•
Participants in working memory experiments often report using articulatory rehearsal or elaboration as strategies.
•
Evidence for a causal role of rehearsal relies primarily on correlations which are open to alternative interpretations.
•
Computational modeling of working memory has revealed limits on how effective rehearsal can be expected to be.
•
Experimental manipulations of the rehearsal activity of adults has shown little, if any, beneficial effect on working memory.

A common assumption in theories of working memory is that a maintenance process – broadly referred to as rehearsal – is involved in keeping novel information available. This review evaluates the effectiveness of three forms of rehearsal: articulatory rehearsal, attention-based refreshing, and elaborative rehearsal. Evidence for the effectiveness of these strategies is surprisingly weak. Experimental manipulations of articulatory rehearsal have yielded working memory benefits in children, but not in adults; experimentally induced refreshing prioritizes the refreshed information, but yields little benefit compared to a baseline without induced refreshing; and elaborative rehearsal improves episodic long-term memory but has little effect on working memory. Thus, although adults spontaneously use some of these strategies, rehearsal might not play a causal role in keeping information in working memory.

Section snippets

Varieties of Rehearsal Proposed as Memory Maintenance Strategies

People often need to hold information briefly in mind – for instance a question from the audience that a speaker wants to respond to, or the constellation of pieces on a chess board that results from mentally simulating a series of moves. Our ability to hold information temporarily available for processing is referred to as short-term or working memory (Box 1). Many theories assume that some form of rehearsal plays an important role in maintaining information in working memory. Rehearsal,

Articulatory Rehearsal

There is no question that many people spontaneously engage in articulatory rehearsal: it is the most prevalent self-reported strategy people use when asked to remember a verbal list for immediate serial recall; among adults about half of the respondents report using it 1., 7.. Overt-rehearsal studies (Box 3) show that most people try to use cumulative rehearsal, although when list items are presented at the most commonly used rate of one per second, they rarely manage to rehearse more than the

Refreshing

Refreshing is an elusive control process which, unlike articulatory rehearsal, cannot be observed directly as a form of behavior (Box 3). The empirical motivation for postulating refreshing as a maintenance process was the observation that performance in complex-span tests is closely related to the opportunities for refreshing: As the distractor processing component of the complex-span procedure is demanded at a slower pace, leaving more free time between individual operations on the distractor

Elaborative Rehearsal

Elaboration means enriching the representation of a stimulus with associated knowledge from semantic memory. For instance, a list of consonants could be used to form a word by filling in appropriate vowels; a list of words could be enriched through the formation of an image of the word’s referents interacting in a scene, or by linking the words into a sentence. In self-report studies, about 15–20% of young adults report using one of these strategies during verbal working memory tasks 1., 6., 7.

Concluding Remarks

An important role of maintenance processes for keeping information in working memory has long been taken for granted by many memory researchers. Recent evidence suggests that the role of these processes might have been overrated. Instructing children in cumulative articulatory rehearsal helps them to maintain verbal materials. By contrast, when articulatory rehearsal was experimentally manipulated in adults, this had no beneficial effect on memory. Refreshing of a subset of items in a memory

Glossary

Articulatory rehearsal: silently (or sometimes, overtly) repeating a set of verbal memory items to oneself.
Brown–Peterson paradigm: a working memory task paradigm in which presentation of a memory list is followed by a retention interval filled with a distractor task (e.g., counting backwards from a given number).
Cognitive load: temporal density of the cognitive demand of a distractor task to be carried out concurrently with memory maintenance. In the time-based resource-sharing (TBRS) theory,

References (54)

C.L. Raye
Refreshing: a minimal executive function
Cortex
(2007)
N.E.A. Kroll et al.
Short-term recall as a function of covert rehearsal and of intervening task
J. Verbal Learn. Verbal Behav.
(1972)
A.D. Baddeley
Word length and the structure of short term memory
J. Verbal Learn. Verbal Behav.
(1975)
K.J. Turley-Ames et al.
Strategy training and working memory task performance
J. Mem. Lang.
(2003)
D. Fegen
The effect of rehearsal rate and memory load on verbal working memory
NeuroImage
(2015)
A.S. Souza et al.
Does articulatory rehearsal help immediate serial recall?
Cogn. Psychol.
(2018)
B. McElree
Accessing recent events
E. Vergauwe et al.
Attentional refreshing of information in working memory: increased immediate accessibility of just-refreshed representations
J. Mem. Lang.
(2017)
M. Thalmann
Revisiting the attentional demands of rehearsal in working-memory tasks
J. Mem. Lang.
(2019)
R. Grenfell-Essam et al.
Examining the relationship between free recall and immediate serial recall: the role of list length, strategy use, and test expectancy
J. Mem. Lang.
(2012)

V. Camos

Two maintenance mechanisms of verbal information in working memory

J. Mem. Lang.

(2009)

A.B. Morrison

Variation in strategy use across measures of verbal working memory

Mem. Cogn.

(2016)

P. Barrouillet

Time constraints and resource sharing in adults’ working memory spans

J. Exp. Psychol. Gen.

(2004)

P. Barrouillet

On the law relating processing to storage in working memory

Psychol. Rev.

(2011)

F.I.M. Craik et al.

Depth of processing and the retention of words in episodic memory

J. Exp. Psychol. Gen.

(1975)

H. Bailey

Why does working memory span predict complex cognition? Testing the strategy affordance hypothesis

Mem. Cogn.

(2008)

J. Dunlosky et al.

The contributions of strategy use to working memory span: a comparison of strategy assessment methods

Q. J. Exp. Psychol.

(2007)

L. Tan et al.

Rehearsal in immediate serial recall

Psychon. Bull. Rev.

(2008)

S.T. Mueller

Theoretical implications of articulatory duration, phonological similarity, and phonological complexity in verbal working memory

J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn.

(2003)

S. Lewandowsky et al.

The word-length effect provides no evidence for decay in short-term memory

Psychon. Bull. Rev.

(2008)

A. Jalbert

When does length cause the word length effect?

J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn.

(2011)

D. Guitard

Word length, set size, and lexical factors: re-examining what causes the word-length effect

J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn.

(2018)

S. Lewandowsky et al.

Rehearsal in serial recall: an unworkable solution to the non-existent problem of decay

Psychol. Rev.

(2015)

J.M. Bebko

Can recall differences among children be attributed to rehearsal effects?

Can. J. Psychol.

(1979)

P. Peng et al.

A randomized control trial of working memory training with and without strategy instruction: effects on young children’s working memory and comprehension

J. Learn. Disabil.

(2017)

S. Miller

The development of memory maintenance strategies: training cumulative rehearsal and interactive imagery in children aged between 5 and 9

Front. Psychol.

(2015)

K. Oberauer

Modeling working memory: an interference model of complex span

Psychon. Bull. Rev.

(2012)

Cited by (46)

The perceptual timescape: Perceptual history on the sub-second scale
2024, Cognitive Psychology
There is a high-capacity store of brief time span (∼1000 ms) which information enters from perceptual processing, often called iconic memory or sensory memory. It is proposed that a main function of this store is to hold recent perceptual information in a temporally segregated representation, named the perceptual timescape. The perceptual timescape is a continually active representation of change and continuity over time that endows the perceived present with a perceived history. This is accomplished primarily by two kinds of time marking information: time distance information, which marks all items of information in the perceptual timescape according to how far in the past they occurred, and ordinal temporal information, which organises items of information in terms of their temporal order. Added to that is information about connectivity of perceptual objects over time. These kinds of information connect individual items over a brief span of time so as to represent change, persistence, and continuity over time. It is argued that there is a one-way street of information flow from perceptual processing either to the perceived present or directly into the perceptual timescape, and thence to working memory. Consistent with that, the information structure of the perceptual timescape supports postdictive reinterpretations of recent perceptual information. Temporal integration on a time scale of hundreds of milliseconds takes place in perceptual processing and does not draw on information in the perceptual timescape, which is concerned with temporal segregation, not integration.
Interference causes forgetting relevant information while driving much more strongly than decay
2023, Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour
Road crashes remain a major public health issue around the world with an unacceptably high number of people getting killed and injured every day. As previous research has indicated, failures in taking other road users into account may be a major cause for a large proportion of these crashes. Recently it was suggested that in some of these cases drivers had looked at the road users at some point of time but had apperently forgotten about them (‘saw but forgot’ error). As research on memory indicates, there are two possible reasons for this forgetting: Information may decay in the working memory when too much time has passed. Additionally, information may be replaced by other information added to memory (interference). To examine the role of these mechanisms in forgetting (recall accuracy), an online 8x8 experimental design was used varying the elapsed time since presenting the information (0 to 14 s in 8 steps; decay hypothesis) and the amount of subsequent information since a situation was perceived (0–7 pieces of information; interference hypothesis). A scenario was used similar to driving on the highway with 89 participants. The results of the 8x8 repeated measures ANOVA show that the participants’ recall accuracy decreased with an increasing amount of subsequent information but was not significantly affected by elapsed time. Accordingly, one would assume that ‘saw but forgot’ errors should occur more frequently with more information present, but not with more time passed. From a perspective of traffic safety, critical situations with a large number of information should be especially targeted for prevention measures.
The role of rehearsal and reminding in the recall of categorized word lists
2023, Cognitive Psychology
Most theories of free recall emphasize the importance of retrieval in explaining temporal and semantic regularities in recall; rehearsal mechanisms are often absent or limit rehearsal to a subset of what was last rehearsed. However, in three experiments using the overt rehearsal method, we show clear evidence that just-presented items act as retrieval cues during encoding (study-phase retrieval) with prior related items rehearsed despite well over a dozen intervening items. Experiment 1 examined free recall of categorized and uncategorized lists of 32 words. In Experiments 2 and 3, we presented categorized lists of 24, 48, and 64 words for free recall or cued recall, with the category exemplars blocked in successive list positions (Experiment 2) or randomized throughout the list (Experiment 3). The probability of rehearsing a prior word was affected by its semantic similarity to the just-presented item, and the frequency and recency of its prior rehearsals. These rehearsal data suggest alternative interpretations to well-known recall phenomena. With randomized designs, the serial position curves were reinterpreted by when words were last rehearsed (which contributed to the list length effects), and semantic clustering and temporal contiguity effects at output were reinterpreted by whether words were co-rehearsed during study. The contrast with the blocked designs suggests that recall is sensitive to the relative (not absolute) recency of targeted list items. We discuss the benefits of incorporating rehearsal machinery into computational models of episodic memory, and suggest that the same retrieval processes that generate the recalls are used to generate the rehearsals.
What is the interference in “verbal interference”?
2022, Acta Psychologica
Citation Excerpt :
In short, induced interference has been suggested to be modality-specific, a finding that is sometimes linked to Baddeley's modal-specific working memory model (Trueswell & Papafragou, 2010). Given that our study found no interference from one verbal task (syllable rehearsal) to another one (conceptualization) our results may be interpreted in the context of more recent working memory models which do not assume distinct modal-specific storage components (Barrouillet et al., 2011; Cowan, 2017; Oberauer, 2019). Our main results both support and refine previous findings in the literature on the inner speech.
Research on the interrelation between language and other components of cognition makes frequent use of verbal interference paradigms. In this, participants are engaged in a primary nonverbal task, while simultaneously repeating non-sense syllables from memory or playback to occupy their articulatory buffer, which is assumed to block internal language use. However, language production involves different subprocesses and levels of representation, and no previous study has explicitly investigated which of these are affected by an occupied articulatory buffer. Thus, the current study addresses the question whether an occupied articulatory buffer significantly interferes with conceptualization. In Experiment 1, speakers name simple objects as fast and as accurately as they can under three conditions. In an interference condition, the verbalization task runs in parallel to a secondary, syllable memorization/recall task, which was expected to induce a situation in which the articulatory buffer temporarily holds phonological information while speakers engage in conceptualization. The articulatory buffer was not occupied in two control conditions. In Experiment 2, speakers performed a similar but more complex task. They verbally responded to visual depictions of actions, again under an interference condition and two control conditions. Results obtained in both experiments suggested no interference. Taken together, the findings suggest that an occupied articulatory buffer does not significantly affect conceptualization.
The domain-specific approach of working memory training
2022, Developmental Review
Citation Excerpt :
Similar to Jones et al. (2020), Partanen et al. (2015) acknowledged that such meta-cognitive strategies inevitably lead to “task-oriented” strategy use that can add to the training effects. In contrast to metacognitive strategies, task-specific strategies are mentally effortful goal-directed processes that have also been found to enhance WM performance (Oberauer, 2019; Peng & Fuchs, 2017). One of the most common WM-specific strategies is rehearsal, which involves the repetition of to-be-remembered information (Baddeley, 1999; Oberauer, 2019; Sadoski et al., 2000; Turley-Ames & Whitfield, 2003).
Converging evidence suggests that traditional domain-general working memory (WM) training does not have reliable far-transfer effects, but produces reliable, modest near-transfer effects on structurally similar untrained tasks. Given the critical role of WM in academic development, WM training that incorporates task-specific features may maximize training effects on academic outcomes. In this theory paper, we discuss the training to emphasize the domain-specific function of WM highlighted by recent WM models. That is, WM should be better attuned to the materials being learned through enhancing strategies of linking together WM with the long-term memory knowledge, rather than only the enhancement of a “domain-general” attentional control overall. We provided two example training routes that emphasize explicit instruction and practice on WM-academic tasks (i.e., academic tasks that can be performed using a WM training paradigm) and task-linking strategies (i.e., strategies that can be used in both academic tasks and WM tasks to improve performance efficiency). We also review recent relevant intervention studies that are in line with this approach and report promising effects on academic outcomes. Implications for future studies are also discussed.
The efficacy of learning strategies from the ICAP perspective
2022, International Encyclopedia of Education: Fourth Edition
The application of cognitive strategies for learning new information has been investigated in the literature for decades. ICAP, a theory about the four modes that students can engage to learn, can be used to rank and evaluate the effectiveness of strategies for enhancing learning with deeper understanding, based on the mode it belongs to, without carrying out an experimental study. Using the criteria for the ICAP modes, we categorized 50 different learning strategies according to the four modes of ICAP: Interactive, Constructive, Active, Passive, which predict learning levels in a descending order, from Interactive, to Constructive, to Active, to Passive.

View all citing articles on Scopus

View full text

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

ReviewIs Rehearsal an Effective Maintenance Strategy for Working Memory?

Highlights

Section snippets

Varieties of Rehearsal Proposed as Memory Maintenance Strategies

Articulatory Rehearsal

Refreshing

Elaborative Rehearsal

Concluding Remarks

Glossary

Cortex

J. Verbal Learn. Verbal Behav.

J. Verbal Learn. Verbal Behav.

J. Mem. Lang.

NeuroImage

Cogn. Psychol.

J. Mem. Lang.

J. Mem. Lang.

J. Mem. Lang.

J. Mem. Lang.

Variation in strategy use across measures of verbal working memory

Mem. Cogn.

Time constraints and resource sharing in adults’ working memory spans

J. Exp. Psychol. Gen.

On the law relating processing to storage in working memory

Psychol. Rev.

Depth of processing and the retention of words in episodic memory

J. Exp. Psychol. Gen.

Why does working memory span predict complex cognition? Testing the strategy affordance hypothesis

Mem. Cogn.

The contributions of strategy use to working memory span: a comparison of strategy assessment methods

Q. J. Exp. Psychol.

Rehearsal in immediate serial recall

Psychon. Bull. Rev.

Theoretical implications of articulatory duration, phonological similarity, and phonological complexity in verbal working memory

J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn.

The word-length effect provides no evidence for decay in short-term memory

Psychon. Bull. Rev.

When does length cause the word length effect?

J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn.

Word length, set size, and lexical factors: re-examining what causes the word-length effect

J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn.

Rehearsal in serial recall: an unworkable solution to the non-existent problem of decay

Psychol. Rev.

Can recall differences among children be attributed to rehearsal effects?

Can. J. Psychol.

A randomized control trial of working memory training with and without strategy instruction: effects on young children’s working memory and comprehension

J. Learn. Disabil.

The development of memory maintenance strategies: training cumulative rehearsal and interactive imagery in children aged between 5 and 9

Front. Psychol.

Modeling working memory: an interference model of complex span

Psychon. Bull. Rev.

Review
Is Rehearsal an Effective Maintenance Strategy for Working Memory?