Adverse orienting effects on visual working memory encoding and maintenance

Benchi Wang,Zhiguo Wang,Jan Theeuwes,Christian N L Olivers,Chuyao Yan

doi:10.3758/s13423-016-1205-4

Abstract

Visual working memory (VWM) representations can be strengthened by pre-cues presented before, and retro-cues presented after, the memory display, providing evidence that attentional orienting plays a role in memory encoding and maintenance. It is unknown whether attentional orienting to VWM stimuli can also have adverse effects (known as inhibition of return; IOR), as has been found for perceptual-cueing tasks. If so, this would provide further evidence for common attentional orienting mechanisms for mnemonic and perceptual representations. In Experiment 1, we used pre-cueing and demonstrated an increased encoding probability, but not precision, at short SOAs, but probability decreased at long SOAs, reminiscent of the classic IOR findings. In Experiment 2, we used retro-cueing and showed that it improved memory performance, unless attention was cued back to the center of the display by a second cue. In this case, the deleterious effects were on precision, indicating that the item was still retained, but its quality of representation suffered. Together, these results provide further evidence for universal spatial attentional mechanisms operating on perceptual as well as mnemonic representations.

Highlights

Visual working memory (VWM) representations can be strengthened by pre-cues presented before, and retrocues presented after, the memory display, providing evidence that attentional orienting plays a role in memory encoding and maintenance
When a pre-cue is presented before the memory array, attention focuses onto its spatial location, and items presented at that location are more likely to be transferred into VWM (Awh & Pashler, 2000; Makovski & Jiang, 2007; Schmidt et al, 2002; Vogel et al, 2005)
The guess rate (g), swap error (β), and standard deviation (σ) were each entered in a repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) with Pre-Cue Location and SOA (200 vs. 400 ms) as factors

Summary

Introduction

Visual working memory (VWM) representations can be strengthened by pre-cues presented before, and retrocues presented after, the memory display, providing evidence that attentional orienting plays a role in memory encoding and maintenance. In Experiment 2, we used retro-cueing and showed that it improved memory performance, unless attention was cued back to the center of the display by a second cue In this case, the deleterious effects were on precision, indicating that the item was still retained, but its quality of representation suffered. Cues can be presented after the memory array has been switched off, allowing the orientation of attention to a spatial location within an internal memory representation (Delvenne, Cleeremans, & Laloyaux, 2009; Griffin & Nobre, 2003; Makovski & Jiang, 2007; Murray, Nobre, Clark, Cravo, & Stokes, 2013; van Moorselaar, Gunseli, Theeuwes, & Olivers, 2015; van Moorselaar, Olivers, Theeuwes, Lamme, & Sligte, 2015) Such so-called retro-cues improve the memory representation of the cued item. We investigated whether IOR affected the probability of encoding, or the precision, by employing a mixture-modeling approach (Bays, Catalao, & Husain, 2009)

Methods

Results

Conclusion