What is the scope of refreshing? Downstream effects of reflective attention do not extend to semantically linked items.

Refreshing is a cognitive process that entails directing the spotlight of internal, or reflective, attention onto a mental representation in service of ongoing cognition. Refreshing shares many parallels with perceptual attention, including its ability to both facilitate and inhibit the processing of recently refreshed items, depending on the circumstances. However, there is currently limited information on the depth to which refreshing causes representations to be processed, or what facets of a multimodal mental representation might be primarily targeted by refreshing. The present study addresses those questions with two experiments involving refreshing word stimuli, aimed at revealing whether effects of refreshing extend to semantically linked items. In Experiment 1, bilingual (English/Malay) participants refreshed words in Malay or English and saw probe words in either the same language, or their equivalent in the other language. In Experiment 2, participants refreshed words in English only, and probe words could potentially be semantic associates of the refreshed item (e.g., dog/cat). Experiment 1 showed clear inhibition for probes of refreshed words, and Experiment 2 showed clear facilitation for probes of refreshed words, both replicating previous results with similar task designs. However, neither study showed any evidence for these effects spreading either to translations of the refreshed word (Experiment 1) or to items semantically related to the refreshed word (Experiment 2). Bayesian analyses confirmed that the most likely model for the data involves no such spreading effects. These results suggest that, at least for word stimuli, refreshing appears to target representations at a relatively superficial orthographic/phonological/sensorimotor level, and not a deeper semantic level.