Editorial: Turning the Mind’s Eye Inward: The Interplay Between

Working memory refers to an intriguing and essential problem in cognitive science: How does the brain succeed in maintaining information for certain duration and perform mental operations on the stored information? An important avenue in tackling this issue stems from the relatively well-defined domain of selective attention. The role of selective attention in working memory has become increasingly dominant over the last decades as information stored in working memory has been shown to modulate (external) selective attention processing—and vice versa (for reviews see e.g., Awh and Jonides, 2001; Kiyonaga and Egner, 2013). Indeed, whereas attentional components in traditional workingmemorymodels typically relate to executive mechanisms assumed to control and supervise dedicated working memory buffers (e.g., Baddeley and Hitch, 1974; Baddeley, 2000), more recent models envisage working memory as directly and specifically emerging from selective attention turned to long-term memory representations (e.g., Cowan, 1999; Oberauer, 2009). Despite the prominent role that selective attentional models of working memory play in current cognitive science, there is still much work to do in determining the precise implications of these models for specific aspects and characteristics of working memory—in both healthy an