Removing information from working memory with a delay: Effective but not beneficial

Ideally, removing outdated information from working memory (WM) should have two consequences: The removed content should be less accessible (removal costs), and other WM content should benefit from the freeing up of WM capacity (removal benefits). Robust removal benefits and removal costs have been demonstrated when people are told to forget items shortly after they were encoded (immediate removal). However, other studies suggest that people might be unable to selectively remove items from an already encoded set of items (delayed removal). In two experiments (n = 219; n = 241), we investigated the effectiveness and consequences of delayed removal by combining a modified version of Ecker's et al. (Journal of Memory and Language, 74, 77-90, 2014) letter updating task with a directed-forgetting in WM paradigm. We found that while delayed removal resulted in reduced memory for the to-be-forgotten item-location relations (removal costs), it failed to enhance performance for existing WM content. This contrasts sharply with immediate removal, where removal benefits can be observed. A fine-grained analysis of removal benefits shows that removal from WM proactively facilitates the subsequent encoding of new information but does not retroactively aid stored WM content.