Editing Working memory (section)

==== Limitations ====
None of these hypotheses can explain the experimental data entirely. The resource hypothesis, for example, was meant to explain the trade-off between maintenance and processing: The more information must be maintained in working memory, the slower and more error prone concurrent processes become, and with a higher demand on concurrent processing memory suffers. This trade-off has been investigated by tasks like the reading-span task described above. It has been found that the amount of trade-off depends on the similarity of the information to be remembered and the information to be processed. For example, remembering numbers while processing spatial information, or remembering spatial information while processing numbers, impair each other much less than when material of the same kind must be remembered and processed.<ref>{{Cite journal|doi=10.1016/j.jml.2006.07.009 |title=The relationship between processing and storage in working memory span: Not two sides of the same coin |date=February 2007 | vauthors = Maehara Y, Saito S |journal=Journal of Memory and Language |volume=56 |issue=2 |pages=212–228}}</ref> Also, remembering words and processing digits, or remembering digits and processing words, is easier than remembering and processing materials of the same category.<ref>{{Cite journal|doi=10.1076/anec.6.2.99.784 |title=Selection from Working Memory: on the Relationship between Processing and Storage Components |date=June 1999 | vauthors = Li KZ |journal=Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition |volume=6 |issue=2 |pages=99–116}}</ref> These findings are also difficult to explain for the decay hypothesis, because decay of memory representations should depend only on how long the processing task delays rehearsal or recall, not on the content of the processing task. A further problem for the decay hypothesis comes from experiments in which the recall of a list of letters was delayed, either by instructing participants to recall at a slower pace, or by instructing them to say an irrelevant word once or three times in between recall of each letter. Delaying recall had virtually no effect on recall accuracy.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Lewandowsky |first1=Stephan |last2=Duncan |first2=Matthew |last3=Brown |first3=Gordon D. A. |title=Time does not cause forgetting in short-term serial recall |journal=Psychonomic Bulletin & Review |date=October 2004 |volume=11 |issue=5 |pages=771–790 |doi=10.3758/bf03196705 |pmid=15732687 }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Oberauer |first1=Klaus |last2=Lewandowsky |first2=Stephan |title=Forgetting in immediate serial recall: Decay, temporal distinctiveness, or interference? |journal=Psychological Review |date=2008 |volume=115 |issue=3 |pages=544–576 |doi=10.1037/0033-295X.115.3.544 |pmid=18729591 |url=https://api.research-repository.uwa.edu.au/ws/files/1546099/11204_PID11204.pdf }}</ref> The [[interference theory]] seems to fare best with explaining why the similarity between memory contents and the contents of concurrent processing tasks affects how much they impair each other. More similar materials are more likely to be confused, leading to retrieval competition.