Abstract
Visual working memory (VWM) resources have been shown to be flexibly distributed according to item priority. This flexible allocation of resources may depend on attentional control, an executive function known to decline with age. In this study, we sought to determine how age differences in attentional control affect VWM performance when attention is flexibly allocated amongst targets of varying priority. Participants performed a delayed-recall task wherein item priority was varied. Error was modelled using a three-component mixture model to probe different aspects of performance (precision, guess-rate, and non-target errors). The flexible resource model offered a good fit to the data from both age groups, but older adults showed consistently lower precision and higher guess rates. Importantly, when demands on flexible resource allocation were highest, older adults showed more non-target errors, often swapping in the item that had a higher priority at encoding. Taken together, these results suggest that the ability to flexibly allocate attention in VWM is largely maintained with age, but older adults are less precise overall and sometimes swap in salient, but no longer relevant, items possibly due to their lessened ability to inhibit previously attended information.
Highlights
The ability to maintain visual representations in working memory is critical in our dynamic environment, enabling the integration of events and information over time to facilitate decision-making and other higher-order executive processes
Previous work with younger adults has shown that response error is affected by probe likelihood in a continuous fashion according to a power law [6,7,17]; our first question was whether older adults’ response error could be characterized by a power law
Replicating previous work with younger adults, we show that item priority predicts visual working memory (VWM) performance
Summary
The ability to maintain visual representations in working memory is critical in our dynamic environment, enabling the integration of events and information over time to facilitate decision-making and other higher-order executive processes. Working memory performance tends to decline with age [1,2,3], which may be attributed to age-related deficits in attentional control [4,5]. Recent models of visual working memory (VWM) suggest that attentional resources are flexibly allocated across stimuli according to their relative priority [6] rather than assigned to a set number of slots in working memory. The ability to flexibly prioritize certain items in memory appears to rely on attentional control [7]. We might expect older adults to be less flexible in their allocation of attention, but this has yet to be explored in visual working memory.
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