Foraging for Thought

Johnson, Matthew; Higgins, Julia S.; Norman, Kenneth A.; Sederberg, Per B.; Smith, Troy A.

doi:10.1177/0956797612466414

Cited by 31 publications

(135 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…The results also corroborate recent evidence that WM representations can act like attended stimuli [36]–[38], but now uncover a neurobiologically plausible mechanism for selective WM maintenance: namely the center-surround configuration likely arising from lateral inhibition that analogously focuses visual attention on representations of task-relevant stimuli in the environment. The results reported herein present compelling evidence that WM processes abide by core properties of attentional selection, which may directly reflect biased competitive dynamics of local neuronal populations, and thus open several avenues of future inquiry into the neurophysiological mechanisms that allow us to select and process information ‘in mind’.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Center-Surround Inhibition in Working Memory

Kiyonaga

Egner

2016

Current Biology

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Summary Directing visual attention toward a particular feature or location in the environment suppresses processing of nearby stimuli [1]–[4]. Echoing the center-surround organization of retinal ganglion cell receptive fields [5], and biasing of competitive local neuronal dynamics in favor of task-relevant stimuli [6], this “inhibitory surround” attention mechanism accentuates the demarcation between task-relevant and irrelevant items. Here, we show that internally maintaining a color stimulus in working memory (WM), rather than visually attending the stimulus in the external environment, produces an analogous pattern of inhibition for stimuli that are nearby in color space. Replicating a well-known effect of attentional capture by stimuli that match WM content [7], visual attention was biased toward (task-irrelevant) stimuli that exactly matched a WM item. This bias was curtailed, however, for stimuli that were very similar to the WM content (i.e., within the inhibitory zone surrounding the focus of WM), and recovered for less similar stimuli (i.e., beyond the bounds of the inhibitory surround). Moreover, the expression of this inhibition effect was positively associated with WM performance across observers. In a second experiment, inhibition also occurred between two items simultaneously held in WM. This suggests that maintenance in WM is characterized by an excitatory peak centered on the focus of (internal) attention, surrounded by an inhibitory zone to limit interference by irrelevant and confusable representations. Here, thus, we show for the first time that the same center-surround selection mechanism that focuses visual attention on sensory stimuli also selectively maintains internally activated representations in WM.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Center-Surround Inhibition in Working Memory

Kiyonaga

Egner

2016

Current Biology

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“…M. K. Johnson and colleagues reported that refreshing of a just-presented item yielded better long-term memory compared to the re-presentation of the item for reading (Grillon, Johnson, Krebs, & Huron, 2008;M. K. Johnson, Reeder, Raye, & Mitchell, 2002;M. R. Johnson et al, 2013).…”

Section: What Is Free Time Being Used For?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Time to process information in working memory improves episodic memory

Souza

Oberauer

2017

Journal of Memory and Language

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In simple-span tasks, participants encode items sequentially for immediate serial recall. Complexspan tasks are similar, except that items are interleaved with a distraction task. Whereas immediate memory is higher in simple than complex span, in tests of episodic long-term memory, better recall for words studied in complex than simple span has been observed (McCabe, 2008). This McCabe effect has been explained by assuming that distraction displace items from working memory, forcing people to covertly retrieve items after each distraction, thereby generating better episodic retrieval-cues than during simple span. Our experiments support an alternative hypothesis: individual words are attended to and processed longer in working memory in complex-span than in simple-span trials. We reduced the presentation rate of words in simple span, creating a "slow span" condition. Across four experiments, slow span improved episodic memory compared to simple span, and this benefit was larger than the McCabe effect.

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“…In a second step, we confirmed that internal selective attention is intrinsically involved in searching through the serial order representation in WM. From the notion that there is direct interfacing between internal and external selective attention (Downing, 2000 ; Awh and Jonides, 2001 ; Corbetta and Shulman, 2002 ; Nobre et al, 2006 ; Johnson et al, 2013 ; Kiyonaga and Egner, 2013 ; Van der Lubbe et al, 2014 ), we combined a similar WM manipulation as described above with the well-known Posner cuing paradigm—typically used to study (external) spatial selective attention (Posner et al, 1982 ). In the Posner paradigm, it has been shown that an attention cue (for example a centrally presented arrow) presented shortly before a to-be-detected dot appears left or right on the screen, facilitates performance when it cues the subsequent dot location validly, but impairs performance when it cues the opposite location.…”

Section: Serial Order Working Memory and Spatial Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Finding the answer in space: the mental whiteboard hypothesis on serial order in working memory

Abrahamse¹,

Dijck²,

Majerus³

et al. 2014

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

116

129

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Various prominent models on serial order coding in working memory (WM) build on the notion that serial order is achieved by binding the various items to-be-maintained to fixed position markers. Despite being relatively successful in accounting for empirical observations and some recent neuro-imaging support, these models were largely formulated on theoretical grounds and few specifications have been provided with respect to the cognitive and/or neural nature of these position markers. Here we outline a hypothesis on a novel candidate mechanism to substantiate the notion of serial position markers. Specifically, we propose that serial order WM is grounded in the spatial attention system: (I) The position markers that provide multi-item WM with a serial context should be understood as coordinates within an internal, spatially defined system; (II) internal spatial attention is involved in searching through the resulting serial order representation; and (III) retrieval corresponds to selection by spatial attention. We sketch the available empirical support and discuss how the hypothesis may provide a parsimonious framework from which to understand a broad range of observations across behavioral, neural and neuropsychological domains. Finally, we pinpoint what we believe are major questions for future research inspired by the hypothesis.

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Foraging for Thought

Cited by 31 publications

References 26 publications

Center-Surround Inhibition in Working Memory

Center-Surround Inhibition in Working Memory

Time to process information in working memory improves episodic memory

Finding the answer in space: the mental whiteboard hypothesis on serial order in working memory

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