Working Memory and Attention – Response to Commentaries

This is a brief reply to the commentaries by Adam and deBettencourt ( 2019 ); Allen ( 2019 ); Kiyonaga ( 2019 ); Schneider ( 2019 ); and Van der Stigchel and Olivers ( 2019 ), focusing on four topics: (1) I defend the idea that attention need not be characterized as a limited resource. (2) I explain how I conceptualize the role of WM in cognitive control, and how recruitment of sensory processing networks contributes to control but not maintenance. (3) I discuss different ways in which information can be selectively prioritized during or after being encoded into WM, and the different consequences of these processes. (4) I argue that sustained attention to a task can be understood as the mind’s ability to prioritize that task over task-unrelated representations.