Abstract
Our ability to maintain small amounts of information in mind is critical for successful performance on a wide range of tasks. However, it remains unclear exactly how this maintenance is achieved. One possibility is that it is brought about using mechanisms that overlap with those used for attentional control. That is, the same mechanisms that we use to regulate and optimize our sensory processing may be recruited when we maintain information in visual short-term memory (VSTM). We aimed to test this hypothesis by exploring how distracter filtering is modified by concurrent VSTM load. We presented participants with sequences of target items, the order and location of which had to be maintained in VSTM. We also presented distracter items alongside the targets, and these distracters were graded such that they could be either very similar or dissimilar to the targets. We analyzed scalp potentials using a novel multiple regression approach, which enabled us to explore the neural mechanisms by which the participants accommodated these variable distracters on a trial-to-trial basis. Critically, the effect of distracter filtering interacted with VSTM load; the same graded changes in perceptual similarity exerted effects of a different magnitude depending upon how many items participants were already maintaining in VSTM. These data provide compelling evidence that maintaining information in VSTM recruits an overlapping set of attentional control mechanisms that are otherwise used for distracter filtering.
Highlights
Our ability to select relevant information from our sensory input for further processing is critical for optimizing our performance on many cognitive tasks
We conducted an analysis on the accuracy of trials when the final item was probed as all trials are well matched across the two levels of visual short-term memory (VSTM) load
This makes our interaction between serial order, VSTM load and our target-distracter similarity factor difficult to interpret, we can think of a number of possible explanations: one possibility is that the impact of target-distracter similarity is swamped by a recency effect (Waugh and Norman, 1965; Shimi and Astle, 2013)—that is, performance is overall worse when the first two sets of items are probed, relative to when the final item is probed, and the impact of target-distracter www.frontiersin.org similarity may only be apparent on the most accurate trials
Summary
Our ability to select relevant information from our sensory input for further processing is critical for optimizing our performance on many cognitive tasks. In our previous study we demonstrated that targets and distracters needed to be more perceptually distinct in order for subjects to reach asymptotic performance when VSTM was full This behavioral result mirrors some other recent results, which show that distracter processing is attenuated when subjects are maintaining a large number of items (e.g., Rissman et al, 2009). When working memory is taxed subjects are less able to mitigate the interference from the incongruent distracters (Pratt et al, 2011) These findings are all consistent with the view that maintaining information for brief periods of time has a detrimental impact upon subjects’ ability to select targets and ignore distracters
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