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The contributions of visual and central attention to visual working memory.

  • Souza AS Department of Psychology, Cognitive Psychology Unit, University of Zürich, Binzmühlestrasse 14/22, 8050, Zurich, Switzerland. a.souza@psychologie.uzh.ch.
  • Oberauer K Department of Psychology, Cognitive Psychology Unit, University of Zürich, Binzmühlestrasse 14/22, 8050, Zurich, Switzerland.
  • 2017-06-11
Published in:
  • Attention, perception & psychophysics. - 2017
Attention
Dual-task costs
Multiple object tracking
Refreshing
Working memory
Attention
Cues
Female
Humans
Male
Memory, Short-Term
Mental Recall
Photic Stimulation
Psychomotor Performance
Visual Perception
Young Adult
English We investigated the role of two kinds of attention-visual and central attention-for the maintenance of visual representations in working memory (WM). In Experiment 1 we directed attention to individual items in WM by presenting cues during the retention interval of a continuous delayed-estimation task, and instructing participants to think of the cued items. Attending to items improved recall commensurate with the frequency with which items were attended (0, 1, or 2 times). Experiments 1 and 3 further tested which kind of attention-visual or central-was involved in WM maintenance. We assessed the dual-task costs of two types of distractor tasks, one tapping sustained visual attention and one tapping central attention. Only the central attention task yielded substantial dual-task costs, implying that central attention substantially contributes to maintenance of visual information in WM. Experiment 2 confirmed that the visual-attention distractor task was demanding enough to disrupt performance in a task relying on visual attention. We combined the visual-attention and the central-attention distractor tasks with a multiple object tracking (MOT) task. Distracting visual attention, but not central attention, impaired MOT performance. Jointly, the three experiments provide a double dissociation between visual and central attention, and between visual WM and visual object tracking: Whereas tracking multiple targets across the visual filed depends on visual attention, visual WM depends mostly on central attention.
Language
  • English
Open access status
bronze
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/global/documents/128391
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