Time-dependent forgetting in visual short-term memory

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis in Journal of Cognitive Psychology on 18/05/2020. The published version can be accessed online here: https://doi.org/10.1080/20445911.2020.1767627 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Whether visual short-term memory can be lost over an unfilled delay, in line with timedependent forgetting, is controversial. Prior work has yielded mixed results and it is possible that other processes make a bigger contribution to memory loss than the length of the retention interval. The present study explored time-dependent forgetting in visual short-term memory in relation to other factors. In three experiments, participants compared single target and probe objects over a 2 s or 10 s retention interval. The objects across trials were either similar or dissimilar (Experiment 1) and had to be remembered in the presence of an additional distractor (Experiment 2) or under conditions where the amount of time separating trials varied (Experiment 3). In all experiments, the retention interval manipulation made the biggest contribution to performance, with accuracy decreasing as the retention interval was lengthened from 2 s to 10 s. These results pose problems for interference and temporal distinctiveness models of memory but are compatible with temporal forgetting mechanisms such as decay