Verbal working memory performance and proactive interference are largely unaffected by matching font color reinstatement
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1688942
archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified
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Summary
This study investigates whether context-dependent memory effects, specifically encoding specificity, operate within verbal working memory. While context reinstatement (matching study and test environments) reliably facilitates long-term memory, its influence on working memory—defined here as the temporary maintenance of information over short delays—remains underexplored. The research aimed to determine if reinstating visual context (font or background color) improves working memory performance and affects proactive interference. The authors conducted five experiments using an item-recognition task where participants studied four words for three seconds, followed by a three-second delay and a single probe word. Participants indicated whether the probe was part of the studied set. The critical manipulation involved presenting the probe in the same color as the study phase (Match) or a different color (Mismatch). Experiments 1–3 varied the implementation of color context: Experiment 1 used random font color positions; Experiment 2 used fixed font color positions; and Experiment 3 used fixed background colors instead of font colors. Experiments 4 and 5 additionally induced recency-based proactive interference by including probes from the previous trial to assess if context reinstatement modulated interference effects. Across all five experiments and 19 assessments of context reinstatement, the results largely failed to support the hypothesis of context-dependent working memory facilitation. In Experiment 1, Match probes showed significantly higher accuracy than Mismatch probes, but this effect did not replicate in subsequent experiments with fixed color positions or background colors. Response times were generally unaffected by context matching, with the exception of a significant difference found only in Experiment 4. Crucially, incidental long-term memory performance showed no significant differences between Match and Mismatch conditions in any experiment. Furthermore, while recency-based proactive interference was present in Experiments 4 and 5, it was not influenced by whether the color context was reinstated. The findings suggest that contextual influences are significantly weaker within working memory compared to long-term memory. The lack of robust context-dependent facilitation implies that the mechanisms governing the temporary maintenance of verbal information differ from those supporting long-term retention. The study concludes that visual context reinstatement does not meaningfully enhance working memory performance or alter proactive interference, challenging the assumption that encoding specificity applies equally across different memory systems.
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| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | DOAJ | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-19 |
| archive | success | unpaywall | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-26 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-19 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-19 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-19 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-19 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 6 | 2026-06-19 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-26; verification: verified.
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