ArticleScience advances2021
More attention with less working memory: The active inhibition of attended but outdated information.
Article in Science advances, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Congruent audiovisual stimulation drives efficient guidance of attention by memory-irrelevant features.Cognitive processing · 2026Article
- Perceptual distraction causes attentional but outdated information to intrude into working memory.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Article
- Long-term mind-body exercise enhances cognitive control over working memory-driven attentional capture.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Statistical regularities bias memory decisions without enhancing working memory encoding: Insights from attribute amnesia.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- Neural dissociation of attention and working memory through inhibitory control.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Statistical learning prioritizes abstract over item-specific representations.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Children exhibit superior memory for attended but outdated information compared to adults.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Flexibility Retained: Unimpaired Updating of Expectations in Schizophrenia.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Decreased Memory-Related Regional Cerebral Perfusion in Severe Obstructive Sleep Apnea with a Mild Cognitive Impairment During Wakefulness.Nature and science of sleep · 2024Article
- Working-Memory-Guided Attention Competes with Exogenous Attention but Not with Endogenous Attention.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Attention has traditionally been regarded as a gateway to working memory, and almost all theoretical frameworks of attention and working memory assume that individuals always have a better memory for information that has received more attention. Here, we provide a series of counterintuitive demonstrations that show that paying more attention to a piece of information impedes, rather than enhances, the selection of this information into working memory. Experiments 1 to 5 provide converging evidence for an even weaker working memory trace of fully attended but outdated features, compared with baseline irrelevant features that were completely ignored. This indicates that the brain actively inhibits attended but outdated information to prevent it from entering working memory. Experiment 6 demonstrates that this inhibition processing is subject to executive control. These findings lead to a substantial reinterpretation of the relationship between attention and working memory.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.