When Does Episodic Memory Contribute to Performance in Tests of Working Memory?

Both the experimental and the psychometric investigation of the WM capacity limit depend critically on the assumption that performance in our tests of WM reflects that capacity limit to a good approximation. Most tasks to measure WM rely on testing memory after a short time during which participants are asked to maintain information in WM. In these tests, episodic long-term memory is likely to also lay down a trace of the memory set. Therefore, participants can draw on two sources of information when memory is tested, making it difficult to separate the contributions of WM and episodic LTM to the performance on immediate-memory tests. Here we use proactive interference to distinguish between these two sources of remembered information, building on the fact that episodic memory is vulnerable to proactive interference, whereas WM is protected against it. We use a release-from-PI paradigm to determine the extent to which commonly used WM tasks reflect contributions from episodic LTM. We focus on memory for serial order of verbal lists, but also include visual and spatial WM tasks. The results of five experiments demonstrate that although some tasks used to investigate WM are heavily contaminated by episodic LTM, other popular paradigms such as serial and probed recall, and the standard version of the continuous color-reproduction task, are not. Measuring proactive interference can help researchers determine the extent to which WM and episodic LTM contribute to performance in immediate-memory tasks.