Fig 1. An example of a trial from the letter updating task (strong-to-weak).

After encoding the first triplet (CHB), participants had to maintain it actively in memory (pre-updating maintenance process: + + +). Next, they were instructed to update part of the association, that is, to remove the item C and substitute the G. Thus, the triplet they were now maintaining was GHB. Lastly, they had to maintain the recently updated triplet (post-updating maintenance process). At recognition, a single red probe was displayed: here, participants had to recognize if the probed item belonged to the most recent studied/updated item or not. In the example, a target probe was presented (B), to which they had to give a positive answer.