No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Attention with or without working memory: mnemonic reselection of attended information
Abstract
Attention has been regarded as the 'gatekeeper' controlling what information gets selected into working memory. However, a new perspective has emerged with the discovery of attribute amnesia, a phenomenon revealing that people are frequently unable to report information they have just attended to moments ago. This report failure is thought to stem from a lack of consolidating the attended information into working memory, indicating a dissociation between attention and working memory. Building on these findings, a new concept called memory reselection is proposed to describe a secondary round of selection among the attended information. These discoveries challenge the conventional view of how attention and working memory are related and shed new light onto modeling attention and memory as dissociable processes.
... These studies reveal that the information selected by attention is not necessarily selected into working memory; instead, working memory has a reselection process for information that had been fully attended. This process is termed as memory selection to distinguish it from attentional selection 24,25 . The memory selection enables our brain to filter out the attended yet outdated information, constituting an efficient information-selection system together with attentional selection. ...
... For example, using the direct forgetting paradigm 43,45 or Think/No-Think paradigm 46 , it was found that children often failed to inhibit unwanted information that had become unnecessary for the current task. The critical difference between these studies and the present study is that, while these studies focuse on the ability to remove outdated information that has already been stored in memory, the current study focuses on the ability to prevent outdated information from entering memory [22][23][24][25] . These abilities are thought as two important ways of how inhibitory mechanisms regulate the contents of memory 38 . ...
Research on the development of cognitive selectivity predominantly focuses on attentional selection. The present study explores another facet of cognitive selectivity—memory selection—by examining the ability to filter attended yet outdated information in young children and adults. Across five experiments involving 130 children and 130 adults, participants are instructed to use specific information to complete a task, and then unexpectedly asked to report this information in a surprise test. The results consistently demonstrate a developmental reversal-like phenomenon, with children outperforming adults in reporting this kind of attended yet outdated information. Furthermore, we provide evidence against the idea that the results are due to different processing strategies or attentional deployments between adults and children. These results suggest that the ability of memory selection is not fully developed in young children, resulting in their inefficient filtering of attended yet outdated information that is not required for memory retention.
... As shown in Fig. 2e, post hoc contrasts showed that the search time was significantly faster in the neutral condition than in the conjunction-match (MD 102 ms, 95% CI 55 to 149, t 29 = 4.422, P < 0.001 and Cohen's d = 0.807) and color-match conditions (MD 110 ms, 95% CI 51 to 168, t 29 = 3.827, P = 0.001 and Cohen's d = 0.699). Critically, the search time was also significantly faster in the neutral condition than in the shape-match condition (MD 48 ms, 95% CI 1 to 95, t 29 = 2.084, P = 0.046 and Cohen's d = 0. 38), suggesting that both the relevant color and the irrelevant shape produced memory-driven attentional bias in PSZ. ...
... Note that in the current task both the relevant and irrelevant feature came from a single object (that is, nonspatial hyperfocusing), making the selection in this case potentially more time consuming compared with situations where only one feature needs to be selected or detected (for example, spatial hyperfocusing 10 ). Moreover, the current task involves WM processes, where the emergence and development of hyperfocusing may arise externally 38 , internally 39 or a combination of both stages. This type of hyperfocusing may be temporally different from that observed in simple perceptual task 10 , which need further explorations in a wider range of cognitive tasks. ...
... As shown in Fig. 2e, post hoc contrasts showed that the search time was significantly faster in the neutral condition than in the conjunction-match (MD 102 ms, 95% CI 55 to 149, t 29 = 4.422, P < 0.001 and Cohen's d = 0.807) and color-match conditions (MD 110 ms, 95% CI 51 to 168, t 29 = 3.827, P = 0.001 and Cohen's d = 0.699). Critically, the search time was also significantly faster in the neutral condition than in the shape-match condition (MD 48 ms, 95% CI 1 to 95, t 29 = 2.084, P = 0.046 and Cohen's d = 0. 38), suggesting that both the relevant color and the irrelevant shape produced memory-driven attentional bias in PSZ. ...
... Note that in the current task both the relevant and irrelevant feature came from a single object (that is, nonspatial hyperfocusing), making the selection in this case potentially more time consuming compared with situations where only one feature needs to be selected or detected (for example, spatial hyperfocusing 10 ). Moreover, the current task involves WM processes, where the emergence and development of hyperfocusing may arise externally 38 , internally 39 or a combination of both stages. This type of hyperfocusing may be temporally different from that observed in simple perceptual task 10 , which need further explorations in a wider range of cognitive tasks. ...
Objective: Recent studies report that people with schizophrenia (PSZ) seem to be superior to healthy control subjects (HCS) in tasks taxing selective attention, a counterintuitive phenomenon known as hyperfocusing. This study aimed to investigate whether PSZ would show hyperfiltering on irrelevant information while hyperfocusing on relevant information, and how these two supranormal effects of attention evolved over time.Methods: This case-control study included three experiments conducted with three independent samples. Participants needed to memorize the color (task-relevant feature) of one object and ignore its shape (task-irrelevant feature). The memory representational strength of task-relevant and irrelevant feature was respectively probed through their working memory (WM)-driven attentional bias effects—an effect showing automatic attentional bias to the items matching information in WM. Experiment 1a aimed to demonstrate PSZ would show both hyperfocusing on relevant information and hyperfiltering on irrelevant information. Experiment 1b aimed to elucidate the dynamic process of hyperfocusing by manipulating time course. Experiment 2 aimed to replicate and generalize key findings with a within-subjects design. Results: Experiment 1a found that compared with HCS, PSZ showed an enhanced attentional facilitation (i.e., hyperfocusing) on relevant color as well as a greater filtering (i.e., hyperfiltering) on irrelevant shape. However, this effect was not observed when the time course was shortened in Experiment 1b. The comparison between Experiments 1a and 1b showed that the representational strength of relevant information was continuously enhanced over time, while the irrelevant information was continuously weakened. These results were replicated and generalized in Experiment 2.Conclusions: These findings reveal that hyperfocusing on relevant information is accompanied with hyperfiltering on irrelevant information in PSZ, which evolves over time by continuously and abnormally enhancing and weakening the processing of relevant and irrelevant information, respectively. This study extends our understanding of cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia through firstly revealing the dynamic process of hyperfocusing.
... When responding is required there is memory consolidation allowing learning of the across-trial association. This idea that attending information may not be enough for consolidating it into working memory is consistent with the recent notion of what has been labelled "memory re-selection" (Fu et al., 2023). ...
Recent evidence shows that observers are able to learn across-trial regularities as indicated by faster responses to targets whose location was predicted by the target’s location on the preceding trial. The present study investigated whether responding to both targets of the pair, as was the case in studies thus far, was needed for learning to occur. Participants searched for a shape singleton target and responded to the line inside. There were two across-trial predicting-predicted regularities regarding target locations: if the target appeared at one specific location on a given trial, it would appear at another specific location on the next trial. Unlike previous experiments, for one of these regularity pairs a response was only needed on either the first or the second target in the pair. Experiment 1 showed that across-trial learning only occurred when responding was required to both targets of a pair. If the response to one target of a pair had to be withheld, no learning occurred. Experiment 2 showed that the absence of learning cannot be attributed to carry-over inhibition resulting from not having to respond. After learning across-trial contingencies, learning remained in place even when the response to the first target of the pair had to be withheld. Our findings show that the execution of the (arbitrary) simple key-press response for both trials of the pair was needed for across-trial statistical learning to occur, whereas solely attending target locations did not result in any learning.
... Correlations between measures of working memory and breadth of attention were as strong as those for measures of each construct (Kreitz et al., 2014). Attention has been considered the 'gatekeeper' that controls what information is selected into working memory (Fu et al., 2023). This condition shows that detecting attention ability can be seen through working memory. ...
Nowadays, the new generation is very familiar with technology. The use of gadgets increases the prevalence of the risk of attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity because gadget addiction affects the excessive release of the hormone dopamine, causing a decrease in the maturity of the Pre pre-frontal cortex. Unfortunately, impaired concentration will ultimately have a prolonged impact on a child's academic performance. Symptoms of lack of concentration in children will interfere with cognitive development, behavior, and social and communication skills. One of the factor is the gadget usage. The gadget provided too much stimulus at once, while attention is the ability to focus the mind or mental ability in sorting information that is not needed and focusing only on the required information. Relaxation is a technique believed to help improve attention. Unfortunately, only a few literature present relaxation carried out on children. This research involved 34 children of elementary school in Surakarta. The experiment was carried out using the one-group pre-post test technique. Corsi block and digit span are used as measurement instruments. The results show a significant difference in children's attention ability before and after the intervention.
... Possibly, searching for a target in a crowded display encourages a deeper level of processing of the target objects (Craik & Lockhart, 1972), resulting in stronger and more detailed memory representations, especially for those tasks that impose difficult search (e.g., conjunction search in Guevara Pinto et al., 2020;Williams et al., 2005). Additionally, our task instructed participants to only remember and recall a surface feature-color-of the objects during presurprise trials, which might have discouraged participants to encode detailed shape information to optimize memory encoding resources (Bates et al., 2019;Fu et al., 2023), compared to other tasks where participants searched for objects and reported their presence (Castelhano & Henderson, 2005;Williams et al., 2005). Thus, while incidental memory of object detail may be poor when remembering specific features of objects, this may be different in other tasks where the requirements for memory encoding are less specified. ...
Prior research has shown that visual working memory capacity is enhanced for meaningful stimuli (i.e., real-world objects) compared to abstract shapes (i.e., colored circles). Here, we hypothesized that the shape of meaningful objects would be better remembered incidentally than the shape of nonmeaningful objects in a color memory task where the shape of the objects is task-irrelevant. We used a surprise-trial paradigm in which participants performed a color memory task for several trials before being probed with a surprise trial that asked them about the shape of the last object they saw. Across three experiments, we found a memory advantage for recognizable shapes relative to scrambled versions of these shapes (Experiment 1) that was robust across different encoding times (Experiment 2), and the addition of a verbal suppression task (Experiment 3). Interestingly, this advantage disappeared when all objects were from the same category (Experiment 4), suggesting that people are incidentally encoding broad conceptual information about object identities, but not visual details. Finally, when we asked about the location of objects in a surprise trial, we did not observe any difference between the two stimulus types (Experiment 5). Overall, these results show that conceptual information about the categories of meaningful objects is incidentally encoded into working memory even when task-irrelevant. This privilege for meaningful information does not exhibit a trade-off with location memory, suggesting that meaningful features influence representations of visual working memory in higher-level visual regions without altering the use of spatial reference frames at the lower level.
The comparison between conscious and unconscious perception is a cornerstone of consciousness science. However, most studies reporting above-chance discrimination of unseen stimuli do not control for criterion biases when assessing awareness. We tested whether observers can discriminate subjectively invisible offsets of Vernier stimuli when visibility is probed using a bias-free task. To reduce visibility, stimuli were either backward masked or presented for very brief durations (1–3 milliseconds) using a modern-day Tachistoscope. We found some behavioral indicators of perception without awareness, and yet, no conclusive evidence thereof. To seek more decisive proof, we simulated a series of Bayesian observer models, including some that produce visibility judgements alongside type-1 judgements. Our data are best accounted for by observers with slightly suboptimal conscious access to sensory evidence. Overall, the stimuli and visibility manipulations employed here induced mild instances of blindsight-like behavior, making them attractive candidates for future investigation of this phenomenon.
Attribute amnesia describes the failure to unexpectedly report the attribute of an attended stimulus, likely reflecting a lack of working memory consolidation. Previous studies have shown that unique meaningful objects are immune to attribute amnesia. However, these studies used highly dissimilar foils to test memory, raising the possibility that good performance at the surprise test was based on an imprecise (gist-like) form of long-term memory. In Experiment 1, we explored whether a more sensitive memory test would reveal attribute amnesia in meaningful objects. We used a four-alternative-forced-choice test with foils having mis-matched exemplar (e.g., apple pie/pumpkin pie) and/or state (e.g., cut/full) information. Errors indicated intact exemplar, but not state information. Thus, meaningful objects are vulnerable to attribute amnesia under the right conditions. In Experiments 2A-2D, we manipulated the familiarity signals of test items by introducing a critical object as a pre-surprise target. In the surprise trial, this critical item matched one of the foil choices. Participants selected the critical object at a higher rate, despite having no awareness of the repetition. By demonstrating that familiarity influences responses in this paradigm, we suggest that meaningful objects are not immune to attribute amnesia but instead side-step the effects of attribute amnesia.
Accumulating evidence demonstrates that selection history influences the allocation of attention. However, it is unclear how working memory (WM), which is tightly connected to attention, is influenced by selection history. The aim of present study was to investigate the influence of encoding history on WM encoding. By incorporating task switching into an attribute amnesia task, participants' encoding history for stimulus attributes was manipulated and its corresponding influence on WM performance was tested. The results revealed that encoding an attribute in one situation can enhance the working memory encoding process for this same attribute in a different situation. Subsequent experiments revealed that this facilitation in WM encoding cannot be explained by increased attentional demand to the probed feature caused by the need to task switch. In addition, verbal instruction does not have a crucial influence on memory performance, which is mainly driven by prior experience in the task. Collectively, our findings lend unique insights into how selection history influences the encoding of information into WM. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
Prior research has shown that visual working memory capacity is enhanced for meaningful stimuli (i.e., real-world objects) compared to abstract shapes (i.e., colored circles). Furthermore, a simple feature that is part of a real-world object is better remembered than the same feature presented on an unrecognizable shape, suggesting that meaningful objects can serve as an effective scaffold in memory. Here, we hypothesized that the shape of meaningful objects would be better remembered incidentally than the shape of non-meaningful objects in a color memory task where identity itself is task-irrelevant. We used a surprise-trial paradigm in which participants performed a color memory task for several trials before being probed with a surprise trial that asked them about the shape of the last object they saw. Across three experiments, we found a memory advantage for recognizable shapes relative to scrambled and unrecognizable versions of these shapes (Exp. 1) that was robust across different encoding times (Exp. 2), and the addition of a verbal suppression task (Exp. 3). In contrast, when we asked about the location of objects in a surprise trial, we did not observe any difference between the two stimulus types (Exp. 4). These results show that identifying information about a meaningful object is encoded into working memory despite being task-irrelevant. This privilege for meaningful shape information does not exhibit a trade-off with location memory, suggesting that meaningful identity influences representations of visual working memory in higher-level visual regions without altering the use of spatial reference frames at the lower level.
Working memory allows us to hold specific pieces of information in an active and easily retrieved state, but what happens to that information during an unexpected interruption between study and test? To answer this question, we used a surprise trial paradigm in which an unexpected event precedes a probe of the observer's memory for a search target. In the first set of experiments, participants were tasked to report the identity of the target letter before unexpectedly being asked to read a task-irrelevant passage. We observed that the introduction of this passage interfered with the observer's memory of the target letter, but this interference only occurred after participants had experience completing the task without interruption. However, a remember cue placed just prior to the reading prompt reduced this cost, suggesting that participants can rapidly reinforce information about the target in working memory to resist the interference. We then used this same cuing manipulation to test whether information in an attribute amnesia paradigm, which unexpectedly probes an attribute relevant to target selection but irrelevant to participant's response expectations, could also be protected against unexpected interference. Using this paradigm, we observed that a remember cue did not improve performance following the surprising event, which supports theories that attribute amnesia is not caused solely by interference. These results reveal both the vulnerability and flexibility of working memory and demonstrate the importance of understanding how task experience establishes expectations that impact the underlying cognitive representations formed by the observer. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
The development of cognitive selectivity focuses primarily on the ability of attentional selection. The current study explored the development of another critical but overlooked selective function—memory selection, by comparing the ability of filtering attended yet outdated information between young children and adults. By adopting a combination of behavioral and eye-tracking technology, Experiments 1-3 consistently showed a “developmental reversal”-like phenomenon that children outperformed adults in reporting the attended yet outdated information. Moreover, this was not caused by the different processing strategy (Experiment 2) or different deployment of attention (Experiment 3) between adults and children. These results suggest that the ability of memory selection is not fully developed for young children, leading to their inefficient filtering of attended yet outdated information that is not required for memory. This demonstration significantly deepens our understanding of the development of cognitive selectivity, and also has implications for understanding the development of cognitive inhibition and early learning.
We investigated the extents of automaticity in location and orientation encoding in visual working memory (VWM) by manipulating their task relevance and assessing the amount of resource recruited by their encoding. Across five experiments, participants were surprised with a location report trial (Experiment 1A, 2A, and 3) or an orientation report trial (Experiment 2A and 2B) at a point when only the item's color had been task-relevant. This was followed by control trials to assess the memory quality of color when location or orientation had become task-relevant. We found the surprise trial performance to be significantly worse than the first control trial for both location and orientation, although to a greater extent for orientation for which there was virtually no measurable information from the subjects' reports. This was the case even when encoding was the only incidental memory process before the control trials (Experiment 2A and 2B), and the surprise memory costs cannot be attributed to the unexpectedness inherent to the surprise question (Experiment 3). The control trials revealed a consistent reduction of color memory only in the orientation experiments. These results suggest that although location encoding is more automatic than orientation, neither is encoded in a fully automatic manner. Our results show that incidentally encoded location is only coarse-grained, constraining the spatial precision of space-based indexing systems. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
We propose a mechanistic explanation of how working memories are built and reconstructed from the latent representations of visual knowledge. The proposed model features a variational autoencoder with an architecture that corresponds broadly to the human visual system and an activation-based binding pool of neurons that links latent space activities to tokenized representations. The simulation results revealed that new pictures of familiar types of items can be encoded and retrieved efficiently from higher levels of the visual hierarchy, whereas truly novel patterns are better stored using only early layers. Moreover, a given stimulus in working memory can have multiple codes, which allows representation of visual detail in addition to categorical information. Finally, we validated our model’s assumptions by testing a series of predictions against behavioural results obtained from working memory tasks. The model provides a demonstration of how visual knowledge yields compact visual representation for efficient memory encoding.
Attention has traditionally been regarded as a gateway to working memory, and almost all theoretical frameworks of attention and working memory assume that individuals always have a better memory for information that has received more attention. Here, we provide a series of counterintuitive demonstrations that show that paying more attention to a piece of information impedes, rather than enhances, the selection of this information into working memory. Experiments 1 to 5 provide converging evidence for an even weaker working memory trace of fully attended but outdated features, compared with baseline irrelevant features that were completely ignored. This indicates that the brain actively inhibits attended but outdated information to prevent it from entering working memory. Experiment 6 demonstrates that this inhibition processing is subject to executive control. These findings lead to a substantial reinterpretation of the relationship between attention and working memory.
Person names, which hold within them extensive meaning, such as gender and cultural information, play an essential role in our social interaction. The intentional memory advantage of person names has been proved, but whether the automatic memory advantage of them exists remains unclear. In order to explore this question, we used a paradigm called attribute amnesia that allows us to test the automatic memory of person names in a working memory task. In Experiment 1, we adopted a classic attribute amnesia paradigm including 11 pre-surprise trials requiring participants to report the location of the target (person names or animal names) among three distractors and one surprise trial requiring them to unexpectedly report the identity of the target. The results showed that the identity report accuracy of person names in the surprise test was significantly better than that of animal names that served as a control group. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 but increased the number of pre-surprise trials that could reduce the report accuracy of surprise test according to previous studies. The results revealed that the accuracy of the surprise test of person names decreased significantly, and showed no significant difference from that of animal names. These results suggest that there exists an automatic memory advantage of person names in working memory; however, such an automatic memory advantage effect could be reduced after participants learn to stop automatically encoding the attended but no-need-to-report person names through experiencing sufficient trials.
Attribute amnesia (AA) is a phenomenon in which participants have difficulty answering an unexpected question about an attended attribute of the most recent target stimulus. A similar situation can occur in cases of real-life eyewitness identification when the eyewitness did not explicitly try to remember the alleged perpetrator’s face despite having attended to it. We found that AA is generalizable to novel faces, such that when participants were unexpectedly asked to identify a face, performance was poor, even though they had just attended to that face seconds ago (N = 40 each in an initial experiment and its replication). This finding shows that unexpected face identification is inaccurate even when the face had just been attended to and suffered minimal decay and interference, implying that AA can explain some cases of failure of eyewitness identification that cannot be attributed to a lack of attention or post-event interference.
Cognitive control guides behaviour by controlling what, when, and how information is represented in the brain1. For example, attention controls sensory processing; top-down signals from prefrontal and parietal cortex strengthen the representation of task-relevant stimuli2–4. A similar ‘selection’ mechanism is thought to control the representations held ‘in mind’—in working memory5–10. Here we show that shared neural mechanisms underlie the selection of items from working memory and attention to sensory stimuli. We trained rhesus monkeys to switch between two tasks, either selecting one item from a set of items held in working memory or attending to one stimulus from a set of visual stimuli. Neural recordings showed that similar representations in prefrontal cortex encoded the control of both selection and attention, suggesting that prefrontal cortex acts as a domain-general controller. By contrast, both attention and selection were represented independently in parietal and visual cortex. Both selection and attention facilitated behaviour by enhancing and transforming the representation of the selected memory or attended stimulus. Specifically, during the selection task, memory items were initially represented in independent subspaces of neural activity in prefrontal cortex. Selecting an item caused its representation to transform from its own subspace to a new subspace used to guide behaviour. A similar transformation occurred for attention. Our results suggest that prefrontal cortex controls cognition by dynamically transforming representations to control what and when cognitive computations are engaged. The prefrontal cortex in monkeys controls working memory in a similar way to attention, by selectively transforming the representations of remembered items.
Attribute amnesia (AA) describes a phenomenon whereby observers fail a surprise memory test which asks them to report an attribute they had just attended and used to fulfil a task goal. This finding has cast doubt on the prominent theory that attention results in encoding into working memory (WM), to which two competing explanations have been proposed: (1) task demands dictate whether attended information is encoded into WM, and (2) attended information is encoded in a weak state that does not survive the demands of the surprise memory test. To address this debate our study circumvented the limitations of a surprise memory test by embedding a second search task within a typical color-based AA search task. The search task was modified so that the attended attribute would reappear in the second search as either the target, a distractor, or not at all. Critically, our results support encoding of the attended attribute in WM though to a weaker extent than the attribute that is required for report. A second experiment confirmed that WM encoding only occurs for the attended attribute, though distractor attributes produce a bias consistent with negative priming. Our data provide novel support for a theory of memory consolidation that links the strength of a memory's representation with expectations for how it will be used in a task. Implications for the utility of this procedure in future investigations previously limited by single trial data (i.e., surprise question methodology) are discussed.
The moment we open our eyes, we experience a rich and detailed visual world, but the amount of information available to report is rather limited. This dissociation relates to a major debate regarding the nature of visual consciousness. The overflow argument suggests that our conscious experience is quite rich and far beyond what can be reported, standing in sharp contrast to the no-overflow argument that visual consciousness is severely impoverished and limited to what can be reported. In this paper, we systematically reviewed existing evidence in favor of the overflow argument, including studies of several variations of the iconic memory paradigm and the divided attention paradigm, as well as studies of neural correlates of consciousness. Simultaneously, we expounded some critical objections and alternative interpretations to such evidence, as well as some opposing evidence. Finally, we introduced a series of our recent studies based on a striking phenomenon of attribute amnesia, which we believe could provide new insight into the overflow view of visual consciousness.
It remains unclear whether and to what extent working memory (WM) temporal subprocesses (i.e., encoding, maintenance, and retrieval) involve shared or distinct intrinsic networks. To address this issue, I constructed a model of intrinsic network contributions to different WM phases and then evaluated the validity of the model by performing a quantitative meta‐analysis of relevant functional neuroimaging data. The model suggests that the transition from the encoding to maintenance and to retrieval stages involves progressively decreasing involvement of the dorsal attention network (DAN), but progressively increasing involvement of the frontoparietal control network (FPCN). Separate meta‐analysis of each phase effect and direct comparisons between them yielded results that were largely consistent with the model. This evidence included between‐phase double dissociations that were consistent with the model, such as encoding > maintenance contrast showing some DAN, but no FPCN, regions, and maintenance > encoding contrast showing the reverse, that is, some FPCN, but no DAN, regions. Two closely juxtaposed regions that are members of the DAN and FPCN, such as inferior frontal junction versus caudal prefrontal cortex and superior versus inferior intraparietal sulcus, showed a high degree of functional differentiation. Although all regions identified in the present study were already identified in previous WM studies, this study uniquely enhances our understating of their roles by clarifying their network membership and specific associations with different WM phases.
Attribute amnesia (AA) is a recently reported phenomenon whereby participants are unable to report a salient attribute of a stimulus (e.g., the color or identity of a target letter) on which their attention has just been focused during a prior task. This counterintuitive effect has been repeatedly replicated with various simple stimuli such as digits and letters. The current study sought to explore boundaries of AA by investigating whether the phenomenon persists when participants encounter complex, meaningful stimuli (e.g., pictures) that have been shown to hold an advantage in cognitive processing and memory. In Experiments 1a–d, we examined whether AA was observed with different types of complex stimuli. In Experiments 2a–b and 3a–b, we linked the type of stimuli (simple vs. complex and meaningful stimuli) to the other two potential boundary factors of AA (i.e., repetitiveness of target stimulus and set effects of Einstellung) to see whether there were interactions between stimuli type and these two boundary factors. The results demonstrated that the AA effect was still consistently observed for complex stimuli in a typical AA paradigm wherein participants encountered many trials and the targets were repeated across trials. However, this effect only appeared for simple stimuli, but not for complex stimuli in two special cases: when target stimuli were never repeated through the experiment, or when the surprise test was placed on the first trial of the experiment. These findings have crucial implications in understanding the boundaries of the AA phenomenon.
Attribute amnesia (Chen & Wyble, 2015, 2016) demonstrates that we may not always be able to spontaneously retrieve a simple attribute of a visual object (e.g., its color) for conscious report, even though the object had just been the target in a visual task. Attribute amnesia has been suggested to reflect a lack of consolidation of the task-irrelevant attribute in visual working memory. Here we tested whether saccadic selection eliminates or attenuates attribute amnesia. Saccade targets have been shown to be preferentially encoded into visual working memory and may therefore be spared. We used simple color pop-out displays, asking participants to indicate the location of the color singleton letter target on each trial either by keypress or by making a saccade toward it. After a couple of trials and unannounced to the participants, we asked for the color and identity of the last target letter on a surprise trial. We found that saccade targets were not spared from attribute amnesia: Participants were as bad in correctly reporting the color in the saccade as in the keypress condition. For letter identity, the effect was attenuated but not abolished when the target was foveated for a short period of time. We argue that the current results do not refute an obligatory coupling between saccadic selection and encoding in visual working memory. However, the encoded information may not necessarily be stored in a manner that is robust enough to persist in the face of a surprise question.
As our environment is frequently changing, it is common that our expectations are violated by unexpected stimuli or events, which leaves us uncertain about which pieces of information will be useful in the future. It is unclear how an expectation violation affects the subsequent control settings for processing of information. The current study directly addressed this issue by employing a double-surprise-trial paradigm based on the attribute amnesia task (Chen & Wyble, 2015a). In Experiment 1, participants were asked to report the location of a target letter presented among distractor digits on several trials and were then unexpectedly asked to report a different attribute (color or identity) of the target letter. In the next trial, participants were asked another unexpected question about the other attribute (identity or color respectively). The results show that, despite participants' poor performance in the first surprise trial, which replicated the attribute amnesia effect, their memory performance in the second surprise trial was dramatically improved, even when the probed attribute was different from that of the first surprise trial. This was also true in Experiment 2, where 15 trials were inserted between the two surprise trials. Experiment 3 further clarified that this effect is not triggered by the mere presence of a surprise test, but rather the violation of expectation about the nature of a surprise test. These results suggest the operation of an adaptive control mechanism that reduces the selectivity of processing in the face of unexpected events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
How is our strategy for forming memories shaped by experience with a task? Previous work using surprise questions (i.e., unexpected by the participant) has shown a remarkable inability to report attributes of an attended target in a search display. This representational poverty presumably reflects a form of information exploitation, in which control processes specialize the conversion of available information into memory representations. We hypothesize that such control is refined by repeated experience with a task, and as a result, memory representations will specialize as task experience accrues, such that report accuracy for an unexpected question will progressively worsen as the number of preceding trials increases. To test this, subjects were asked to report the location of a letter among three digits. The ability to respond correctly to a surprise question about the identity of that letter became worse as the experiment progressed. A follow-up study evaluated whether this incremental worsening of report accuracy could be explained as a buildup of proactive interference by varying the set of letters for the surprise test. The results were unchanged relative to the original experiment, which argues against a primary contribution of proactive interference in the worsening performance. The effect was replicated in a similar paradigm using color disks. These findings illustrate that repeated performance of a prescriptive task engages an adaptive modification of control processes that focus information processing on specific attributes of a stimulus that are expected to be necessary in the future, regardless of their immediate task relevance.
Spatial cueing is thought to indicate the resource limits of visual attention because invalidly cued items are reported more slowly and less accurately than validly cued items. However, limited resource accounts cannot explain certain findings, such as dividing attention without costs, or attentional benefits without invalidity costs. The current study presents a new account of exogenous cueing, namely the memory encoding cost (MEC) theory, which integrates attention and memory encoding to explain costs and benefits evoked by a spatial cue. Unlike conventional theories that focus on the role of attention in yielding spatial cueing effects, the MEC theory argues that some cueing effects are caused by a combination of attentional facilitation evoked by the cue, but also the cost of encoding the cue into memory. The crucial implication of this theory is that limitations in attentional deployment may not necessarily be the cause of invalidity costs. MEC generates a number of predictions that we test here, providing five convergent lines of evidence that cue encoding plays a key role in producing cueing effects. Furthermore, the MEC suggests a common mechanism underlying cueing costs and the attentional blink, and we simulate the core empirical findings of the current study with an existing attentional blink model. The model was able to simulate these effects primarily through manipulation of a single parameter that corresponds to memory encoding. The MEC theory thus simplifies our theoretical understanding of attentional effects by linking the attentional blink and some varieties of spatial cueing costs to a common mechanism.
An emerging literature indicates that working memory and attention interact in determining what is retained over time, though the nature of this relationship and the impacts on performance across different task contexts remain to be mapped out. In the present study, four experiments examined whether participants can prioritize one or more ‘high reward’ items within a four-item target array for the purposes of an immediate cued recall task, and the extent to which this mediates the disruptive impact of a post-display to-be-ignored suffix. All four experiments indicated that endogenous direction of attention towards high-reward items results in their improved recall. Furthermore, increasing the number of high-reward items from 1 to 3 (Experiments 1-3) produces no decline in recall performance for those items, while associating each item in an array with a different reward value results in correspondingly graded levels of recall performance (Experiment 4). These results suggest the ability to exert precise voluntary control in the prioritization of multiple targets. However, in line with recent outcomes drawn from serial visual memory, this endogenously driven focus on high-reward items results in greater susceptibility to exogenous suffix interference, relative to low-reward items. This contrasts with outcomes from cueing paradigms, indicating that different methods of attentional direction may not always result in equivalent outcomes on working memory performance.
What happens to goal-relevant information in working memory after it is no longer needed? Here, we review evidence for a selective removal process that operates on outdated information to limit working memory load and hence facilitates the maintenance of goal-relevant information. Removal alters the representations of irrelevant content so as to reduce access to it, thereby improving access to the remaining relevant content and also facilitating the encoding of new information. Both behavioral and neural evidence support the existence of a removal process that is separate from forgetting due to decay or interference. We discuss the potential mechanisms involved in removal and characterize the time course and duration of the process. In doing so, we propose the existence of two forms of removal: one is temporary, and reversible, which modifies working memory content without impacting content-to-context bindings, and another is permanent, which unbinds the content from its context in working memory (without necessarily impacting long-term forgetting). Finally, we discuss limitations on removal and prescribe conditions for evaluating evidence for or against this process.
Previous work has shown mixed evidence regarding age-related deficits for binding in working memory. The current study used the newly developed attribute amnesia effect (H. Chen & Wyble, 2015a) to test the associative-deficit hypothesis during working memory and to probe whether hyper-binding extends to include binding of de-selected information. In studies of attribute amnesia, participants use target attributes (e.g., identity, color) to demonstrate near ceiling levels of reporting of a second target attribute (e.g., location) across a series of trials (H. Chen & Wyble, 2015a, 2016). Yet, despite having just processed the target-defining attribute, they have difficulty reporting it on a surprise trial. This effect provides several predictions for associative binding in aging. The associative-deficit hypothesis predicts age-related decline on the surprise trial, whereas an extension of hyper-binding predicts age-related increase in performance in older adults. In Experiment 1, when working memory load was low, older adults demonstrated attribute amnesia equal to that found in younger adults. When load increased in Experiment 2, older adults again demonstrated attribute amnesia as well as an age deficit for reporting target attributes. In lieu of spontaneous binding, results suggest that expectancy plays a critical role in older adults’ propensity to encode and bind target attributes in working memory. Results further suggest that expectancy alone is not enough for older adults to form bound representations when task demands are high. Taken together results revealed a boundary condition of hyper-binding and further provided conditional support for the associative-deficit hypothesis in working memory.
We often remember information without its source (e.g., word or picture format). This phenomenon has been studied extensively in long-term memory but rarely in the context of short-term working memory (WM), which leaves open the question of whether source amnesia can result from a lack of memory encoding rather than forgetting. This study provided a series of striking and novel demonstrations showing participants’ inability to report the source of a color representation immediately after that color was used in a task and stored in memory. These counterintuitive findings occurred when participants repeatedly judged the congruency between two color representations from one single object (i.e., color and identity of a color word) or two distinct objects (i.e., color of a square and identity of a color word) and then were unexpectedly asked to report the source of one color representation. These discoveries suggest that source information is often not stored in WM.
Attribute amnesia is the counterintuitive phenomenon where observers are unable to report a salient aspect of a stimulus (e.g., its colour or its identity) immediately after the stimulus was presented, despite both attending to and processing the stimulus. Almost all previous attribute amnesia studies used highly familiar stimuli. Our study investigated whether attribute amnesia would also occur for unfamiliar stimuli. We conducted four experiments using stimuli that were highly familiar (colours or repeated animal images) or that were unfamiliar to the observers (unique animal images). Our results revealed that attribute amnesia was present for both sets of familiar stimuli, colour ( p < .001) and repeated animals ( p = .001); but was greatly attenuated, and possibly eliminated, when the stimuli were unique animals ( p = .02). Our data shows that attribute amnesia is greatly reduced for novel stimuli.
It is well known that information can be held in memory while performing other tasks concurrently, such as remembering a color or number during a separate visual search task. However, it is not clear what happens to stored information in the face of unexpected tasks, such as the surprise questions that are often used in experiments related to inattentional and change blindness. Does the unpredicted shift in task context cause memory representations to be cleared in anticipation of new information? To answer this question, we ran two experiments where the task unexpectedly switched partway through the experiment with a surprise question. Half of the participants were asked to report the same attribute (Exp. 1 = Identity, Exp. 2 = Color) of a target stimulus in both presurprise and postsurprise trials, while for the other half, the reported attribute switched from identity to color (Exp. 1) or vice versa (Exp. 2). Importantly, all participants had to read an unexpected set of instructions and respond differently on the surprise trial. Accuracy on the surprise trial was higher for the same-attribute groups than the different-attribute groups. Furthermore, there was no difference in reaction time on the surprise trial between the two groups. These results suggest that information participants expected to report can survive an encounter with an unexpected task. The implication is that failures to report information on a surprise trial in many experiments reflect genuine differences in memory encoding, rather than forgetting or overwriting induced by the surprise question.
Human cognition is characterized by astounding flexibility, enabling us to select appropriate information according to the objectives of our current task. A circuit of frontal and parietal brain regions, often referred to as the frontoparietal attention network or multiple-demand (MD) regions, are believed to play a fundamental role in this flexibility. There is evidence that these regions dynamically adjust their responses to selectively process information that is currently relevant for behavior, as proposed by the “adaptive coding hypothesis” [Duncan, J. An adaptive coding model of neural function in prefrontal cortex. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2, 820–829, 2001]. Could this provide a neural mechanism for feature-selective attention, the process by which we preferentially process one feature of a stimulus over another? We used multivariate pattern analysis of fMRI data during a perceptually challenging categorization task to investigate whether the representation of visual object features in the MD regions flexibly adjusts according to task relevance. Participants were trained to categorize visually similar novel objects along two orthogonal stimulus dimensions (length/orientation) and performed short alternating blocks in which only one of these dimensions was relevant. We found that multivoxel patterns of activation in the MD regions encoded the task-relevant distinctions more strongly than the task-irrelevant distinctions: The MD regions discriminated between stimuli of different lengths when length was relevant and between the same objects according to orientation when orientation was relevant. The data suggest a flexible neural system that adjusts its representation of visual objects to preferentially encode stimulus features that are currently relevant for behavior, providing a neural mechanism for feature-selective attention.
We measured the precision with which an irrelevant feature of a relevant object is stored in visual short-term memory. In each experiment, 600 online subjects each completed 30 trials in which the same feature (orientation or color) was relevant, followed by a single surprise trial in which the other feature was relevant. Pooling data across all subjects, we find in a delayed-estimation task but not in a change localization task that the irrelevant feature is retrieved, but with much lower precision than when the same feature is relevant: The irrelevant/relevant precision ratio was 3.8% for orientation and 20.4% for color.
Working memory is a limited resource. To further characterize its limitations, it is vital to understand exactly what is encoded about a visual object beyond the "relevant" features probed in a particular task. We measured the memory quality of a task-irrelevant feature of an attended object by coupling a delayed estimation task with a surprise test. Participants were presented with a single colored arrow and were asked to retrieve just its color for the first half of the experiment before unexpectedly being asked to report its direction. Mixture modeling of the data revealed that participants had highly variable precision on the surprise test, indicating a coarse-grained memory for the irrelevant feature. Following the surprise test, all participants could precisely recall the arrow's direction; however, this improvement in direction memory came at a cost in precision for color memory even though only a single object was being remembered. We attribute these findings to varying levels of attention to different features during memory encoding.
There is substantial debate over whether visual working memory (VWM) and visual attention constitute a single system for the selection of task-relevant perceptual information or whether they are distinct systems that can be dissociated when their representational demands diverge. In the present study, we focused on the relationship between visual attention and the encoding of objects into VWM. Participants performed a color change-detection task. During the retention interval, a secondary object, irrelevant to the memory task, was presented. Participants were instructed either to execute an overt shift of gaze to this object (Experiments 1-3) or to attend it covertly (Experiments 4 and 5). Our goal was to determine whether these overt and covert shifts of attention disrupted the information held in VWM. We hypothesized that saccades, which typically introduce a memorial demand to bridge perceptual disruption, would lead to automatic encoding of the secondary object. However, purely covert shifts of attention, which introduce no such demand, would not result in automatic memory encoding. The results supported these predictions. Saccades to the secondary object produced substantial interference with VWM performance, but covert shifts of attention to this object produced no interference with VWM performance. These results challenge prevailing theories that consider attention and VWM to reflect a common mechanism. In addition, they indicate that the relationship between attention and VWM is dependent on the memorial demands of the orienting behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record
Recent reports have suggested that the attended features of an item may be rapidly forgotten once they are no longer relevant for an ongoing task (attribute amnesia). This finding relies on a surprise memory procedure that places high demands on declarative memory. We used intertrial priming to examine whether the representation of an item's identity is lost completely once it becomes task irrelevant. If so, then the identity of a target on one trial should not influence performance on the next trial. In 3 experiments, we replicated the finding that a target's identity is poorly recognized in a surprise memory test. However, we also observed location and identity repetition priming across consecutive trials. These data suggest that, although explicit recognition on a surprise memory test may be impaired, some information about a particular target's identity can be retained after it is no longer needed for a task. (PsycINFO Database Record
Memory training (MT) in older adults with memory deficits often leads to frustration and, therefore, is usually not recommended. Here, we pursued an alternative approach and looked for transfer effects of 1-week attentional filter training (FT) on working memory performance and its neuronal correlates in young healthy humans. The FT effects were compared with pure MT, which lacked the necessity to filter out irrelevant information. Before and after training, all participants performed an fMRI experiment that included a combined task in which stimuli had to be both filtered based on color and stored in memory. We found that training induced processing changes by biasing either filtering or storage. FT induced larger transfer effects on the untrained cognitive function than MT. FT increased neuronal activity in frontal parts of the neuronal gatekeeper network, which is proposed to hinder irrelevant information from being unnecessarily stored in memory. MT decreased neuronal activity in the BG part of the gatekeeper network but enhanced activity in the parietal storage node. We take these findings as evidence that FT renders working memory more efficient by strengthening the BG–prefrontal gatekeeper network. MT, on the other hand, simply stimulates storage of any kind of information. These findings illustrate a tight connection between working memory and attention, and they may open up new avenues for ameliorating memory deficits in patients with cognitive impairments.
A recently reported phenomenon, termed attribute amnesia, challenged the commonly held belief that attention plays the determining role in controlling how information is remembered, by showing that participants fail to remember a specific attended attribute (e.g., the target-defining color), even when they had just used that attribute to perform a task (Chen & Wyble, 2015a). The main purpose of the present study sought to better understand the mechanism underlying this phenomenon. The results revealed that attribute amnesia was nearly eliminated once participants were forced to store and hold attended information for a brief time, suggesting that this amnesia effect most likely reflects a lack of memory consolidation for an attended attribute that had been processed to some certain level. In addition, we demonstrate that the effect is not particular to the use of location report, or the repetition of targets. One further finding is that amnesia was markedly absent for location memory, indicating an important difference between memories for locations and attributes such as color or identity.
People intuitively believe that when they become consciously aware of a visual stimulus, they will be able to remember it and immediately report it. The present study provides a series of striking demonstrations of behavior that is inconsistent with such an intuition. Four experiments showed that in certain conditions, participants could not report an attribute (e.g., letter identity) of a stimulus even when that attribute had been attended and had reached a full state of conscious awareness just prior to being questioned about it. We term this effect attribute amnesia, and it occurs when participants repeatedly locate a target using one attribute and are then unexpectedly asked to report that attribute. This discovery suggests that attention to and awareness of a stimulus attribute are insufficient to ensure its immediate reportability. These results imply that when attention is configured by using an attribute for target selection, that attribute will not necessarily be remembered.
© The Author(s) 2015.
Although it has been well known that visual cues affect the perception of subsequent visual stimuli, relatively little is known about how the cues themselves are processed. The present study attempted to characterize the processing of a visual cue by investigating what information about the cue is stored in terms of both location ("where" is the cue) and attributes ("what" are the attributes of the cue). In 11 experiments subjects performed several trials of reporting a target letter and then answered a surprise question about the cue (e.g., the location, color, or identity of the cue) in the last trial. Participants could report the location of the cue even when the cue never indicated the target location and they were explicitly told to ignore it. Furthermore, the memory trace of this location information endured during encoding of the subsequent target. In contrast to location, attribute information (e.g. color and identity) was poorly reported, even when the attribute was used by subjects to perform the task. These results shed new light on the mechanisms underlying cueing effects and suggest also that the visual system may create empty object files in response to visual cues.
Copyright © 2014. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
We demonstrate that task relevance dissociates between visual awareness and knowledge activation to create a state of seeing without knowing-visual awareness of familiar stimuli without recognizing them. We rely on the fact that in order to experience a Kanizsa illusion, participants must be aware of its inducers. While people can indicate the orientation of the illusory rectangle with great ease (signifying that they have consciously experienced the illusion's inducers), almost 30% of them could not report the inducers' color. Thus, people can see, in the sense of phenomenally experiencing, but not know, in the sense of recognizing what the object is or activating appropriate knowledge about it. Experiment 2 tests whether relevance-based selection operates within objects and shows that, contrary to the pattern of results found with features of different objects in our previous studies and replicated in Experiment 1, selection does not occur when both relevant and irrelevant features belong to the same object. We discuss these findings in relation to the existing theories of consciousness and to attention and inattentional blindness, and the role of cognitive load, object-based attention, and the use of self-reports as measures of awareness.
© 2015 New York Academy of Sciences.
The study sought to investigate whether and how expectation violation can modulate attention using the exogenous spatial cueing paradigm, under the theoretical framework of the Memory Encoding Cost (MEC) model. The MEC proposes that exogenous spatial cueing effects are mainly driven by a combination of two distinct mechanisms: attentional facilitation triggered by the presence of an abrupt cue, and attentional suppression induced by memory encoding of the cue. In current experiments, participants needed to identify a target letter that was sometimes preceded by a peripheral onset cue. Various types of expectation violation were introduced by regulating the probability of cue presentation (Experiments 1 & 5), the probability of cue location (Experiments 2 & 4), and the probability of irrelevant sound presentation (Experiment 3). The results showed that expectation violation could enhance the cueing effect (valid vs. invalid cue) in some cases. More crucially, all experiments consistently observed asymmetrical modulation of expectation violation on the cost (invalid vs. neutral cue) and benefit (valid vs. neutral cue) effects: Expectation violation increased the cost effects while did not modulate or decreased (or even reversed) the benefit effects. Furthermore, Experiment 5 provided direct evidence that violation of expectations could enhance the memory encoding of a cue (e.g., color) and this memory advantage could manifest quickly in the early stages of the experiment. The MEC better explains these findings than some traditional models like the spotlight: Expectation violation can both enhance the attentional facilitation of the cue and memory encoding of irrelevant cue information. These findings suggest that expectation violation has a general adaptive function in modulating the attention selectivity.
A key problem that the mind has to solve is gating which information will be stored in memory. The conventional idea of sensory attention as a working memory (WM) selection mechanism is widely accepted. The present studies challenged this traditional view by showing that even fully attended information may not be encoded into WM, indicating a WM reselection process for attended information. More importantly, the mechanism of WM reselection was explored and the surprising finding was that the reselection operates through a dimensional-memory-filter. That is, the brain could selectively encode the attended information from one feature dimension while blocking others from another dimension at the same time. However, once a feature is selected, all concurrently attended information from the same dimension would be automatically encoded into WM regardless of whether they are necessary for the task. These findings have critical implications for understanding neural mechanisms of memory formation.
Flexible behavior requires guidance not only by sensations that are available immediately but also by relevant mental contents carried forward through working memory. Therefore, selective-attention functions that modulate the contents of working memory to guide behavior (inside-out) are just as important as those operating on sensory signals to generate internal contents (outside-in). We review the burgeoning literature on selective attention in the inside-out direction and underscore its functional, flexible, and future-focused nature. We discuss in turn the purpose (why), targets (what), sources (when), and mechanisms (how) of selective attention inside working memory, using visual working memory as a model. We show how the study of internal selective attention brings new insights concerning the core cognitive processes of attention and working memory and how considering selective attention and working memory together paves the way for a rich and integrated understanding of how mind serves behavior.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 74 is January 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Individuals are often unable to report an attribute of an object to which they recently attended, if they expected to report a different attribute, a phenomenon known as attribute amnesia (AA). To date, all AA studies have occurred in the visual domain. The purpose of this study was to explore the boundary conditions of AA by testing if AA also occurs in the auditory domain and, if so, for which attributes. It was found that AA was present when reporting the location ( p = .003) and the number of tones ( p < .001) of an auditory stimulus, but not when reporting its pitch ( p = .383). These findings can be understood in terms of the organisation of the primary cortical areas and help explain the differences between visual working memory and auditory working memory.
Previous evidence demonstrated that individuals can recall a target’s location in a search display even if location information is completely task-irrelevant. This finding raises the question: does this ability to automatically encode a single item’s location into a reportable memory trace extend to other aspects of spatial information as well? We tested this question using a paradigm designed to elicit attribute amnesia (Chen & Wyble, Psychological Science, 26(2) 203-210, 2015a). Participants were initially asked to report the location of a target letter among digits with stimuli arranged to form one of two or four spatial configurations varying randomly across trials. After completing numerous trials that matched their expectations, participants were surprised with a series of unexpected questions probing their memory for various aspects of the display they had just viewed. Participants had a profound inability to report which spatial configuration they had just perceived when the target’s location was not unique to a specific configuration (i.e., orthogonal). Despite being unable to report the most recent configuration, answer choices on the surprise trial were focused around previously seen configurations, rather than novel configurations. Thus, there were clear memories of the set of configurations that had been viewed during the experiment but not of the specific configuration from the most recent trial. This finding helps to set boundary conditions on previous findings regarding the automatic encoding of location information into memory.
There is a long-standing debate on whether visual consciousness is confined to cognitive access measured by reportability, or whether it is rich and overflows reportability. Much of the debate in previous studies concentrated on whether information outside attentional focus could be consciously experienced and reportable. This study sought to address the debate from a new perspective, through testing whether fully attended supraliminal information is necessarily reportable with a variation of attribute amnesia. Participants were asked to judge the parity of a single number or whether a Chinese character referred to furniture. After several trials, they were unexpectedly asked to report the stimulus identity. The results consistently showed that participants could not correctly report the identity, indicating that fully attended information that was consciously perceived could sometimes overflow report. In addition to providing novel overflow evidence, these findings also have crucial implications in understanding the relationship between consciousness and working memory.
Even in sparse visual environments, observers may not be able to report features of objects they have just encountered in a surprise question. Attribute amnesia and seeing without knowing describe report failures for irrelevant features of objects that have been processed to some extent in the primary task. Both phenomena are attributed to the exclusive selection of relevant information for memory consolidation or for awareness, respectively. While attribute amnesia was found even for irrelevant attributes of the target in the primary task, seeing without knowing was not observed when a single object was presented foveally. To elucidate this discrepancy, we examined report failures for irrelevant attributes of single target objects, which were presented either in the fovea or in the periphery, and either at cued or uncued locations. On a surprise trial, observers were able to report the irrelevant shape and color of the target object when it was presented foveally. However, presenting the same object just slightly away from the fovea led to report failures for shape. Introducing a valid peripheral cue prior to target presentation reduced report failures for shape when the cue was predictive of the target location, suggesting that the pre-allocation of endogenous spatial attention promoted the processing of irrelevant shape information. In accordance with previous research, we suggest that these modulations are due to differences in late selection for conscious awareness or consolidation in working memory.
To facilitate visual continuity across eye movements, the visual system must presaccadically acquire information about the future foveal image. Previous studies have indicated that visual working memory (VWM) affects saccade execution. However, the reverse relation, the effect of saccade execution on VWM load is less clear. To investigate the causal link between saccade execution and VWM, we combined a VWM task and a saccade task. Participants were instructed to remember one, two, or three shapes and performed either a No Saccade-, a Single Saccade-or a Dual (corrective) Saccade-task. The results indicate that items stored in VWM are reported less accurately if a single saccade-or a dual saccade-task is performed next to retaining items in VWM. Importantly, the loss of response accuracy for items retained in VWM by performing a saccade was similar to committing an extra item to VWM. In a second experiment, we observed no cost of executing a saccade for auditory working memory performance, indicating that executing a saccade exclusively taxes the VWM system. Our results suggest that the visual system presaccadically stores the upcoming retinal image, which has a similar VWM load as committing one extra item to memory and interferes with stored VWM content. After the saccade, the visual system can retrieve this item from VWM to evaluate saccade accuracy. Our results support the idea that VWM is a system which is directly linked to saccade execution and promotes visual continuity across saccades.
For decades, the fundamental processes underlying memory and attention have been understood within an "information processing" framework in which information passes from one processing stage to another, leading eventually to a response. More recently, however, the attempt to build a general theoretical framework for information processing has been largely supplanted in favor of two more recent approaches: mathematical models of processing and direct investigations of brain function. This book reconciles theoretical conflicts in the literature to present an important, analytical update of the traditional information-processing approach by modifying it to incorporate the last few decades of research on memory, attention, and brain functioning. Throughout, the book cogently considers and ultimately refutes recent challenges to the fundamental assumption of the existence of special short-term memory and selective attention faculties. It also draws a key distinction between memory processes operating inside and outside of the focus of attention. The book hopes to foster an understanding of how memory and attention operate together, and how both functions are produced by brain processes.