Abstract
Selective attention plays a prominent role in prioritizing information in working memory (WM), improving performance for attended representations. However, it remains unclear whether unattended WM representations suffer from information loss. Here we tested the hypothesis that within WM, selectively attending to an item and stopping storing other items are independent mechanisms. We recorded EEG while participants performed a WM recall task in which the item most likely to be tested was cued retrospectively during retention. By manipulating retro-cue reliability (i.e., the ratio of valid to invalid cue trials), we varied the incentive to retain non-cued items. Storage and selective attention in WM were measured during the retention interval by contralateral delay activity (CDA) and contralateral alpha power suppression, respectively. Soon after highly reliable cues, the cued item was attended, and non-cued items suffered information loss. However, for less reliable cues, initially the cued item was attended, but unattended items were kept in WM. Later during the delay, previously unattended items suffered information loss despite now attention being reallocated to their locations, presumably to strengthen their weakening traces. These results show that storage and attention in WM are distinct processes that can behave differently depending on the relative importance of representations.
Highlights
Working memory (WM) is essential to storing and manipulating information online for a variety of cognitive tasks[1,2,3,4]
As we propose, the contralateral delay activity (CDA) reflects dropping of the non-cued item, which is ipsilateral to the retro-cue, instead of a mnemonic or attentional boost for the cued item, which is contralateral to the retro-cue, the retro-cue reliability should mainly modulate the ipsilateral vs. contralateral ERPs
Selective attention has been claimed to be essential for working memory (WM) storage[12,14,15,16,18,19]
Summary
Working memory (WM) is essential to storing and manipulating information online for a variety of cognitive tasks[1,2,3,4]. Much of the evidence for a central role of selective attention in WM storage comes from studies using retrospective cues Such “retro-cues” indicate which of the memory representations is most likely to be tested and is the most task-relevant. Such invalid cueing costs have been found in some studies, and have been taken as evidence that attention is necessary for WM storage[36,37,38]. While the presence of invalid retro-cue costs varied with retro-cue reliability, benefits of valid retro-cues were present in both conditions, though they were larger for 80% valid cues[39] These results can explain the discrepant findings in the literature if we assume that attending to an item in WM can be dissociated from the decision to either continue or cease storage of remaining items. Only for highly reliable cues, it is worth dropping the non-cued items from memory, while for moderately reliable cues it is worth holding on to the non-cued items
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