Location has a privilege, but it is limited: Evidence from probing task-irrelevant location.

Abstract

We investigated the extents of automaticity in location and orientation encoding in visual working memory (VWM) by manipulating their task relevance and assessing the amount of resource recruited by their encoding. Across five experiments, participants were surprised with a location report trial (Experiment 1A, 2A, and 3) or an orientation report trial (Experiment 2A and 2B) at a point when only the item's color had been task-relevant. This was followed by control trials to assess the memory quality of color when location or orientation had become task-relevant. We found the surprise trial performance to be significantly worse than the first control trial for both location and orientation, although to a greater extent for orientation for which there was virtually no measurable information from the subjects' reports. This was the case even when encoding was the only incidental memory process before the control trials (Experiment 2A and 2B), and the surprise memory costs cannot be attributed to the unexpectedness inherent to the surprise question (Experiment 3). The control trials revealed a consistent reduction of color memory only in the orientation experiments. These results suggest that although location encoding is more automatic than orientation, neither is encoded in a fully automatic manner. Our results show that incidentally encoded location is only coarse-grained, constraining the spatial precision of space-based indexing systems.

Representation and computation in working memory

“…or orientation showed evidence that irrelevant features were maintained, albeit only weakly (Shin and Ma, 2016;Swan et al, 2016). Stimulus location appears to take a special role in that it is robustly recalled even when task-irrelevant (Chen and Wyble, 2015;Kondo and Saiki, 2012;Foster et al, 2017;Cai et al, 2019), although with reduced precision (Tam and Wyble, 2022). The temporal order of sequentially presented stimuli may likewise be maintained automatically (Heuer and Rolfs, 2021).…”

Search without building memories: Failure of visual recall for easy search tasks in natural scenes

“…In previous studies that explored the impact of surprise on working memory retention, it was shown that expectation violations may damage existing memory representations (O'Donnell & Wyble, 2023;Swan et al, 2017;Tam & Wyble, 2022;Wessel, 2018;Wessel et al, 2016).…”

Task Demands Differentially Affect Processing of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Object Features in Working Memory

“…Intrinsic features are features that are inherent to a perceptual object, such as an object’s surface color. A sizeable literature has found that such intrinsic features can be encoded and represented in WM even if they are task-irrelevant (e.g., Gu et al, 2022; Shen et al, 2013; Zhang et al, 2013), even though there is also some evidence that representation of task-irrelevant object features tends to be low in fidelity or short-lived (e.g., Logie et al, 2011; Shin & Ma, 2016; Swan et al, 2016; Xu, 2010) and may not always occur (e.g., Serences et al, 2009; Tam & Wyble, 2022). By contrast, extrinsic features are features that are associated with an object (e.g., through spatial proximity) but are part of a separate perceptual unit, such as the color of a frame surrounding an object (Troyer & Craik, 2000; also see Ceraso, 1985; Davachi, 2006; Frings & Rothermund, 2017; Garner, 1974; Kirmsse et al, 2018; Schmalbrock & Frings, 2022; van Geldorp et al, 2015; Zimmer et al, 2006).…”