Gotcha: Working memory prioritization from automatic attentional biases

Ravizza, Susan M.; Conn, Katelyn M.

doi:10.3758/s13423-021-01958-1

Cited by 11 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 111 publications

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“…Indeed, previous studies have shown that top-down manipulations with presentation times shorter than 2000 ms can have strong effects on VWM performance for equally salient stimuli (Bays et al, 2011;Dube et al, 2017;Emrich et al, 2017;Klink et al, 2017;Ravizza et al, 2021; see also, Ravizza and Conn, 2022). Some of these studies have also looked at the interplay of salience, presentation time and top-down influences, but none of them contained a nonconfounded and direct manipulation of to-be-remembered stimuli's salience (for a discussion, see Constant & Liesefeld, 2021).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Effects of salience are long-lived and stubborn

Constant¹,

Liesefeld²

2022

Preprint

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Salience is a core determinant of attentional processing. Although information on salience has been shown to dissipate within a few hundred milliseconds, we recently observed massive effects of salience on the delayed recall from visual working memory (VWM) more than 1300 ms after stimulus onset. Here, we manipulated presentation duration of the memory display and found that effects of salience, albeit decreasing over time, were still markedly present after 3000 ms (2000 ms presentation; Exp. 1). In an attempt to overrule this persistent influence of salience we made less salient stimuli more relevant (by rewarding their prioritized processing in Exp. 2 or by probing them more often in Exp. 3). Participants were unable to reliably prioritize low-salience stimuli. Thus, our results demonstrate that effects of salience or their repercussions have surprisingly long-lasting effects on cognitive performance that reach even relatively late processing stages and are difficult to overrule by volition.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Effects of salience are long-lived and stubborn

Constant¹,

Liesefeld²

2022

Preprint

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“…Indeed, previous studies have shown that top-down manipulations with presentation times shorter than 2,000 ms can have strong effects on VWM performance for equally salient stimuli (Bays et al, 2011; Dube et al, 2017; Emrich et al, 2017; Klink et al, 2017; Ravizza et al, 2021; see also, Ravizza & Conn, 2022). Some of these studies have also looked at the interplay of salience, presentation time and top-down influences, but none of them contained a nonconfounded and direct manipulation of to-be-remembered stimuli’s salience (for a discussion, see Constant & Liesefeld, 2021).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With this manipulation, participants should be highly incentivized to focus their available resources on less salient targets to maximize their gains. Recently, it has been called into question, whether reward can increase overall VWM performance (van den Berg et al, 2023), but that reward can affect the distribution of limited cognitive resources among concurrently presented stimuli is well established (reviewed in, e.g., Anderson, 2019) and, in fact, such an effect has been demonstrated also in VWM tasks (Allen & Ueno, 2018; Klink et al, 2017; for a VWM-focused review, see Ravizza & Conn, 2022). As we believe that implementing top-down control takes more than a few hundred milliseconds, we expected (preregistration: https://osf.io/fxwyp) an effect of salience for displays presented for 350 ms.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of salience are long-lived and stubborn.

Constant¹,

Liesefeld²

2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Salience is a core determinant of attentional processing. Although information on salience has been shown to dissipate within a few hundred milliseconds, we recently observed massive effects of salience on the delayed recall from visual working memory more than 1,300 ms after stimulus onset. Here, we manipulated presentation duration of the memory display and found that effects of salience, albeit decreasing over time, were still markedly present after 3,000 ms (2,000 ms presentation; Experiment 1). In an attempt to overrule this persistent influence of salience, we made less salient stimuli more relevant (by rewarding their prioritized processing in Experiment 2 or by probing them more often in Experiment 3). Participants were unable to reliably prioritize low-salience stimuli. Thus, our results demonstrate that effects of salience or their repercussions have surprisingly long-lasting effects on cognitive performance that reach even relatively late processing stages and are difficult to overrule by volition.

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“…Therefore, whatever causes this trial to be particularly easy has little to do with working memory storage, or higher level processes that are thought to occur in working memory such as the formation of perceptual chunks (Nassar et al, 2018). Instead, attention appears to be biased toward the probed item on this trial during study, and remains so throughout the retention interval as would be expected from bottom-up, automatic attentional biases, which have been shown to have large effects on working memory performance (e.g., Constant & Liesefeld, 2021;Ravizza & Conn, 2022).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Systematic differences in visual working memory performance are not caused by differences in working memory storage.

Pratte¹,

Green²

2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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People vary in their performance on visual working memory tasks, and these individual differences covary with a wide range of higher-level cognitive processes including fluid intelligence. Performance also varies across study displays, purportedly driven by both low- and higher-level processes. Understanding what causes these sources of systematic variability has been crucial for developing theories of working memory. However, here we find that all such variability in performance on a test of visual working memory can be accounted for by concurrent variability in visual iconic memory: A person with relatively high working memory capacity will have high iconic memory capacity, and a particularly easy working memory display will also be easy under iconic memory conditions. These results are supported by a nonparametric factor analysis and hierarchical Bayesian model comparison. In a second experiment the relationship between iconic and working memory holds even when they are measured with substantially different experimental paradigms, and a third experiment suggests that the relationship between tests of iconic and working memory is driven by mechanisms other than iconic or working memory storage, such as variation in perceptual or attentional processes.

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Gotcha: Working memory prioritization from automatic attentional biases

Cited by 11 publications

References 111 publications

Effects of salience are long-lived and stubborn

Effects of salience are long-lived and stubborn

Effects of salience are long-lived and stubborn.

Systematic differences in visual working memory performance are not caused by differences in working memory storage.

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