Executive working memory involved in the learning of contextual cueing effect

Chen, Ming‐Hui; Wang, Chao; Sclodnick, Ben; Zhao, Guang; Liu, Xingze

doi:10.1007/s00221-019-05643-7

Cited by 10 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Most secondary tasks employed in these experiments may not be sufficiently demanding to drain the scarce resources needed to acquire these attentional habits. In this regard, Chen et al (2019) have shown that taxing the executive component of WM by asking participants to manipulate information abolishes the acquisition and the expression of contextual cuing. Regarding the modality of the information, visuospatial information can partially disrupt contextual and probabilistic cuing (Giménez-Fernández et al, 2023; Travis et al, 2013).…”

Section: Efficiencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking Attentional Habits

Giménez-Fernández,

Luque,

Shanks

et al. 2023

Curr Dir Psychol Sci

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Attentional habits acquired by visual statistical learning cause enduring biases toward specific locations. These habits, driven by recent search history, are thought to be independent of both goal-directed and stimulus-driven attentional mechanisms. This theoretical claim is based on three characteristics that these habits apparently exhibit, that is, they are inflexible, implicit, and efficient. We review methodological limitations in previous studies and briefly describe recent results that challenge this new framework. We conclude that it might be premature to assume that attentional habits are based on a special search history process that differs from the two traditionally recognized attentional mechanisms.

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Section: Efficiencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking Attentional Habits

Giménez-Fernández,

Luque,

Shanks

et al. 2023

Curr Dir Psychol Sci

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“…Eventually, RTs become faster for repeated compared to new displays. Several studies found that contextual cuing was not observed if participants were asked to concurrently perform a WM task (Chen et al, 2019; Manginelli et al, 2012). However, not all the studies have replicated these results (Annac et al, 2013, Experiment 2D; Manginelli et al, 2013, Experiment 1), and there are several attempts to explain why WM load sometimes does and sometimes does not impair contextual cuing.…”

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confidence: 99%

The role of working memory in probabilistic cuing of visual search.

Giménez‐Fernández¹,

Vicente-Conesa²,

Luque³

et al. 2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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In a typical probabilistic cuing experiment, participants are asked to find a visual target among a series of distractors. Although participants are not informed about this, the target appears more frequently in one region of the display, resulting in faster search times for targets located in this region. This bias is thought to depend on a habit-like attentional control mechanism, unconstrained by the availability of working memory (WM) resources. However, the only study that has explored this feature in the past suffers from methodological shortcomings that leave the results open to alternative explanations. In three experiments, we aimed to confirm whether probabilistic cuing is unaffected by visual, spatial, and spatiotemporal WM load. For each experiment, one group of participants performed the visual search task during the retention interval of a WM task (high-load group), whereas another group of participants (no-load group) carried out the visual search task after the WM task. We hypothesized that the probabilistic cuing effect would be larger for the no-load group compared to the high-load group. This hypothesis was confirmed in one experiment, but exploratory analyses suggest that the results can be highly dependent on the analytic approach, casting doubts on its robustness. Overall, our results provide partial support for the hypothesis that probabilistic cuing is not affected by a secondary task. However, given that some analyses reveal an effect of WM load, we conclude that it might be premature to rule out the possibility that the expression of this attentional bias requires WM resources.

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“…The role of WM in visual statistical learning has been widely studied in related experimental paradigms, like contextual cueing (Annac et al, 2013;Chen et al, 2019;Manginelli et al, 2013;Travis et al, 2013;Vicente-Conesa et al, 2022;Vickery et al, 2010) and probabilistic cueing (Gimenez-Fernández et al, 2022;Won & Jiang, 2015).…”

Section: Distractor Suppression and Working Memorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This may be a problem because executive resources may play a role in the encoding of the statistical regularities. For instance, Chen et al (2019) measured contextual cueing under executive and non-executive load. In both conditions, a series of digits appeared on the display (3 for the low group, and 4 for the high group).…”

Section: Distractor Suppression and Working Memorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning to suppress a distractor does not depend on working memory resources

Vicente-Conesa¹,

Castillejo²,

Vadillo³

2023

Preprint

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Over the last decade, the additional singleton task has been widely used to study visual statistical learning. In this paradigm, participants are instructed to find a target while ignoring a series of distractors. In some trials, a salient singleton distractor is added to the search display, making the task more difficult. However, if the singleton appears more frequently in one particular location of the display, participants eventually learn to suppress attention towards this location. It has been suggested that this type of learning is probably implicit and independent of working memory (WM) resources. To our knowledge, only one study has explored the impact of WM in suppression effect (Gao and Theeuwes, 2020). However, there are reasons to suspect that the amount and type of WM load used in that study may have been suboptimal to detect any effects on distractor suppression. The aim of the present study was to explore the impact of WM load on distractor suppression addressing these issues. Contrary to our expectations, our results confirm that this type of learning is indeed highly resilient even to strong manipulations of working memory load.

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Executive working memory involved in the learning of contextual cueing effect

Cited by 10 publications

References 32 publications

Rethinking Attentional Habits

Rethinking Attentional Habits

The role of working memory in probabilistic cuing of visual search.

Learning to suppress a distractor does not depend on working memory resources

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