The 2026 theme — Working Memory, Strategy, and Consciousness — aims to bridge traditional cognitive perspectives and neuroscientific approaches to working memory (WM). We will explore how strategic control processes, awareness, and unconscious mechanisms interact to shape WM performance. Key thematic questions may include: What are the strategic processes modulating working memory and how do they vary across tasks and individuals? How do conscious and unconscious mechanisms interact during encoding, maintenance, and retrieval in WM? What neural correlates underpin these strategic and awareness-related components of WM? To what extent are current WM models sufficient to explain these phenomena? But as tradition dictates, all research related to working memory will also be welcome.