Any lapse of attention (or goal neglect, De Jong et al., 1999 and Duncan, 1995) will

likely lead to a loss of the task goal and will result in attention being automatically captured by internal (e.g., mind-wandering; Kane et al., 2007 and McVay Enzalutamide mouse and Kane, 2012) or external distraction (e.g., Fukuda and Vogel, 2009 and Unsworth et al., 2004). Thus, attention control abilities are needed to protect items that are being held in the focus of attention (or primary memory), to effectively select target representations for active maintenance, and to filter out irrelevant distractors and prevent them from gaining access to the current focus of attention (e.g., Vogel et al., 2005). Given that attention control is needed to protect items within the capacity of the focus of attention, it is perhaps not surprising that prior work has suggested a close linkage between capacity and attention control (e.g., Cowan et al., 2006, Unsworth and Engle, 2007a and Vogel et al., 2005). The current results provide important evidence for this linkage and suggest that capacity and attention control are very much highly related. Like capacity, attention control abilities are needed in a host of activities

where internal and external distraction can capture attention away from the primary task (such as reading, problem solving, or reasoning) leading to items being displaced from the current focus of attention. Within the overall WM system attention control is needed to ensure that task-relevant items are being actively maintained and attentional capture http://www.selleckchem.com/products/Bafilomycin-A1.html from internal and external distractors is prevented. The final main facet within the current framework is secondary memory abilities. Secondary memory abilities refer to the ability to successfully encode information into secondary memory and to recover information that was recently displaced from the focus of attention or to bring relevant items into the focus of attention. As noted previously, given Docetaxel that capacity

and attention control abilities are limited, it seems likely that some items will not be able to be maintained and thus, they will have to be retrieved from secondary memory. In order for information to be retrieved from secondary memory it is critically important that that information was successfully encoded in the first place and that appropriate retrieval cues can be generated to access the desired information. Thus, individuals will differ in the extent to which they can successfully encode information into secondary memory (e.g., Bailey et al., 2008 and Unsworth and Spillers, 2010b) as well as the ability to generate cues to successfully retrieve information from secondary memory (e.g., Unsworth et al., 2013 and Unsworth et al., 2012).