Although recent evidence suggests that visual short-term memory (VSTM) is a continuous resource, little is known about how flexibly this resource can be allocated. Previous studies using probabilistic cues to indicate two different levels of probe probability have found that response precision can be predicted according to a continuous allocation of resources that depends on attentional priority. The current study used a continuous report procedure and attentional prioritization via simultaneous probabilistic spatial cues to address whether participants can use up to three levels of attentional priority to allocate VSTM resources. Three experiments were performed with differing priority levels, different cues, and cue presentation time. Although group level analysis demonstrated flexible allocation, there was limited evidence that participants were using three priority levels. An individual differences approach revealed that a minority of participants were using three levels of attentional priority, demonstrating that, while possible, it is not the predominant pattern of behavior.
Although recent evidence suggests that visual short-term memory is a continuous resource, little is known about how flexibly this resource can be allocated. The current study used a continuous report procedure and attentional prioritization via probabilistic spatial cues to address three unknown properties of a flexible continuous resource. The first experiment measured multiple responses from each trial to assess whether multiple items could simultaneously be prioritized. Second, since past work has shown that participants could prioritize VSTM representations according to two states of attentional priority, we examined whether participants could maintain three levels of priority. Lastly, we examined whether flexible allocation is possible when the prioritization cues are provided after initial encoding (i.e. a retro-cue). The results demonstrated that when participants had to recall multiple items on each trial, there were clear differences in response precision between cued and uncued items; however, two items of the same category were not always stored with equal precision. When three attentional priority levels were provided, participants’ precision was no different between high- and medium-priority, but significantly improved over low priority items, suggesting participants did not assign different memory weights to the two higher-priority conditions. When prioritization was performed via retro-cues, participants could re-allocate memory resources, but not when more than one item was to be prioritized, suggesting limitations in the flexible allocation of resources after initial encoding. Together, the results provide evidence of a VSTM resource that is flexibly, but variably, allocated using up to two attentionally guided priority goals, primarily during encoding.
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