Abstract
Studies with the retro-cue paradigm have shown that validly cueing objects in visual working memory long after encoding can still benefit performance on subsequent change detection tasks. With regard to the effects of invalid cues, the literature is less clear. Some studies reported costs, others did not. We here revisit two recent studies that made interesting suggestions concerning invalid retro-cues: One study suggested that costs only occur for larger set sizes, and another study suggested that inclusion of invalid retro-cues diminishes the retro-cue benefit. New data from one experiment and a reanalysis of published data are provided to address these conclusions. The new data clearly show costs (and benefits) that were independent of set size, and the reanalysis suggests no influence of the inclusion of invalid retro-cues on the retro-cue benefit. Thus, previous interpretations may be taken with some caution at present.
Highlights
Cues that validly direct attention to locations where relevant stimulation will appear soon thereafter improve performance
Results from this study indicate that the RCE is overall larger and costs only occur with high retro-cue reliability compared to low reliability
We suggest that set size is not critical
Summary
Cues that validly direct attention to locations where relevant stimulation will appear soon thereafter improve performance. This has been known since the spatial pre-cuing experiments of Posner (1980), and cues facilitate encoding of stimuli into visual working memory (VWM; e.g., Jiang et al, 2000; Janczyk and Reuss, 2016). Several studies have included invalid retro-cues and assessed the performance costs induced by them (e.g., Astle et al, 2012b; Gözenman et al, 2014; Gunseli et al, 2015). We revisit two recent studies that employed invalid retro-cues and offered interesting conclusions based on their results. Besides considering whether costs of invalid cues exist or not, we focus on the following two questions:
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