Is Rehearsal an Effective Maintenance Strategy for Working Memory?

A common assumption in theories of working memory is that a maintenance process – broadly referred to as rehearsal – is involved in keeping novel information available. This review evaluates the effectiveness of three forms of rehearsal: articulatory rehearsal, attention-based refreshing, and elaborative rehearsal. Evidence for the effectiveness of these strategies is surprisingly weak. Experimental manipulations of articulatory rehearsal have yielded working memory benefits in children, but not in adults; experimentally induced refreshing prioritizes the refreshed information, but yields little benefit compared to a baseline without induced refreshing; and elaborative rehearsal improves episodic long-term memory but has little effect on working memory. Thus, although adults spontaneously use some of these strategies, rehearsal might not play a causal role in keeping information in working memory. •Most theories of working memory assume that some form of rehearsal process is necessary to temporarily maintain information.•Recent research has expanded the suite of proposed rehearsal processes, including articulatory rehearsal, refreshing, and elaboration.•Participants in working memory experiments often report using articulatory rehearsal or elaboration as strategies.•Evidence for a causal role of rehearsal relies primarily on correlations which are open to alternative interpretations.•Computational modeling of working memory has revealed limits on how effective rehearsal can be expected to be.•Experimental manipulations of the rehearsal activity of adults has shown little, if any, beneficial effect on working memory.