Content-specific working memory modulation of the attentional blink.

Elkan G Akyürek,Sonja M Ostermeier,Ali Abedian-Amiri

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0016696

Abstract

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of working memory content on temporal attention in a rapid serial visual presentation attentional blink paradigm. It was shown that categorical similarity between working memory content and the target stimuli pertaining to the attentional task (both digits) increased attentional blink magnitude compared to a condition in which this similarity was absent (colors and digits, respectively). This effect was only observed when the items in working memory were not presented as conjunctions of the involved categories (i.e., colored digits). This suggested that storage and retrieval from working memory was at least preferentially conjunctive in this case. It was furthermore shown that the content of working memory enhanced the identification rate of the second target, by means of repetition priming, when inter-target lag was short and the attentional blink was in effect. The results are incompatible with theories of temporal attention that assume working memory has no causal role in the attentional blink and support theories that do.

Highlights

Attention cannot be deployed efficiently to more than one perceptual event within about 500 ms
In an attentional blink task, when the observer is processing the first target and unable to put the second target stimulus through this late processing phase, and thereby consolidate it to some degree, its partially processed features suffer from decay and interference as they linger in the early processing stage
The first type of working memory content used presently was different from the type of items used in the attentional task; participants were asked to remember a number of colors and to attend to two alphanumeric targets in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP)

Summary

Introduction

Attention cannot be deployed efficiently to more than one perceptual event within about 500 ms. Several influential theories of temporal attention have attributed a crucial role to memory consolidation [4,5,6,7] In these and similar accounts, basic visual feature perception can operate in parallel for multiple stimuli, but more elaborate processing, such as associated with memory consolidation, binding, (object) identification and response selection, cannot. The essence of these accounts is a division between two phases or stages of processing; an early stage that is more or less capable of processing several stimuli simultaneously without strong interference, and a subsequent late stage that is not (i.e., it is serial). The loss of information in the parallel stage is caused indirectly by the bottleneck in the serial processing stage, and so gives rise to the attentional blink

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