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Article History

Received: 29 July 2025

Accepted: 3 October 2025

First Online: 13 January 2026

Declarations

:

: The regulations of our funding agency, the DFG, as well as regulations at our university, specify for psychological research projects that individual approval is only required for studies that entail a risk or a high level of stress for participants, for studies that provide partial information about its aims and procedures, for patient samples, for functional magnetic resonance imaging, electrical or magnetic stimulation, and for psychopharmacological studies. None of these conditions applied to our experiments, which is why we did not seek ethical approval by an institutional review board. The study was performed in accordance with the ethical guidelines of the German Psychological Society (DGPs) and with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments.

: Informed consent for participation was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

: Informed consent for publication was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

: The authors have no relevant financial or nonfinancial interests to disclose.

: For Experiment 1, the preregistration ( ), which we adapted after collecting our fourth pilot sample (see section Participants for details), the data (trial-level) and the analysis code are publicly accessible at the Open Science Framework ( ). We preregistered to investigate two different processes, namely (1) binding and retrieval as well as (2) error cancellation in Experiment 1. Per our preregistration, we only present the results on binding and retrieval here and we will publish our results on error cancellation separately to make the two topics more accessible for readers. For Experiment 2, we also made the preregistration ( ), the data (trial-level) and the analysis code publicly available ( ).