Multiple high-reward items can be prioritized in working memory but with greater vulnerability to interference

Abstract

Emerging literature indicates that working memory and attention interact in determining what is retained over time, though the nature of this relationship and the impacts on performance across different task contexts remain to be mapped. In the present study, four experiments examined whether participants can prioritize one or more high-reward items within a four-item target array for the purposes of an immediate cued recall task, and the extent to which this mediates the disruptive impact of a postdisplay to-be-ignored suffix. All four experiments indicated that endogenous direction of attention toward high-reward items results in their improved recall. Furthermore, increasing the number of high-reward items from one to three (Experiments 1-3) produces no decline in recall performance for those items, while associating each item in an array with a different reward value results in correspondingly graded levels of recall performance (Experiment 4). These results suggest the ability to exert precise voluntary control in the prioritization of multiple targets. However, in line with recent outcomes drawn from serial visual memory, this endogenously driven focus on high-reward items results in greater susceptibility to exogenous suffix interference, relative to low-reward items. This contrasts with outcomes from cueing paradigms, indicating that different methods of attentional direction may not always result in equivalent outcomes on working memory performance.

The influence of reward magnitude on stimulus memory and stimulus generalization in categorization decisions.

“…The general pattern of our category-learning results, thus, is in line with previous findings on the effect of reward magnitude on cognitive processes such as memory and attention (e.g., Allen & Ueno, 2018;B. A. Anderson, 2013;Della Libera & Chelazzi, 2009;Klink, Jentgens, & Lorteije, 2014;Klink et al, 2017).…”

“…Despite the common intuition about the enhancing effects of reward motivation, a closer look at recent working memory studies (e.g., Allen & Ueno, 2018;Klink, Jeurissen, Theeuwes, Denys, & Roelfsema, 2017;Wallis, Stokes, Arnold, & Nobre, 2015) reveals that differences in performance between high-and low-reward stimuli possibly stem from worse performance for low-reward stimuli instead of better performance for high-reward stimuli. For instance, Klink et al (2017) compared conditions in which item reward values were disclosed either during item encoding or during retrieval.…”

Attention and binding in visual working memory: Two forms of attention and two kinds of buffer storage

“…Thus, according to Cowan (2011), the focus of attention has a capacity of three or four chunks, whereas according to Oberauer and Hein (2012), it only holds a single item or chunk (though see Oberauer, 2018, for a recent adjustment to this view). Our data are quantitatively closer to the lower end of this capacity scale, though with some evidence that more than one item can be concurrently prioritized (Allen & Ueno, 2018;Hitch et al, 2018). In another respect, our theoretical position is radically different from both models, and from others like them that regard working memory as the currently activated region of long-term memory.…”

“…Taken together, these results suggest that the form of representation of the most recent items can also underpin memory for the first item, given appropriate prioritization instructions. Further experiments have shown that this result generalizes, in that the same combination of enhanced recall and increased vulnerability to suffix interference appears for any item given high priority (Hitch et al, 2018), with these findings also extending to simultaneous presentation of multi-item arrays (Allen & Ueno, 2018). It seems, therefore, that internally directed attention can be used to maintain memory representations in the state they occupy automatically upon receiving Fig.…”

Can children prioritize more valuable information in working memory? An exploration into the effects of motivation and memory load.

“…The current study, as with other work examining reward-based prioritisation (e.g. Allen & Ueno, 2018;Atkinson et al, 2018;Berry et al, 2018;Hitch et al, 2018;Hu et al, 2014), used a primary task assessing memory for binding between features (color and shape).…”