Claims

People can selectively remove no-longer-relevant information from WM, but removal of an arbitrary subset of items is inefficient

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · review r3 · q2
Currency · newest study 2019 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims

Reading the evidence codes

q is the design tier, i the impact, n the sample, and the kind with its r the rigour judged within that kind: what each code means.

This claim: no standardized effect is recorded in observations/ for it yet, so no benchmark reading is possible.

q2 i? Removing an entire memory set is rapid and seamless, but people find it difficult to remove a random subset of several items from a memory set unless the subset was clearly marked at encoding. → Oberauer 2019

Evidence

Oberauer 2019

Oberauer, K. (2019). Working Memory and Attention – A Conceptual Analysis and Review. Journal of Cognition, 2(1): 36. https://doi.org/10.5334/joc.58

q2 · i? · review · r3

The review's synthesis of removal evidence from updating paradigms and forget-cue experiments. Successful removal of a subset of three words from a six-word list occurred only when the subset was clearly marked at encoding (Oberauer, 2018). The review states people "find it difficult to remove a random subset" and that removal efficiency is limited by ability to discriminate to-be-maintained from to-be-removed contents.

"People find it difficult to remove a random subset of several items from a memory set"

Discussion

Page metadata
Field Value
type claim
id wm-removal-efficient-sets-limited-subsets
title People can selectively remove no-longer-relevant information from WM, but removal of an arbitrary subset of items is inefficient
description People can selectively remove no-longer-relevant information from WM, but removal of an arbitrary subset of items is inefficient
status review
evidence_strength moderate
newest_evidence 2019
generated by process:wiki-ingest on 2026-10-16
trust unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources 1 — oberauer-2019

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