Prioritization within visual working memory reflects a flexible focus of attention

Abstract

When motivated, people can keep nonrecent items in a list active during the presentation of new items, facilitating fast and accurate recall of the earlier items. It has been proposed that this occurs by flexibly orienting attention to a single prioritized list item, thus increasing the amount of attention-based maintenance directed toward this item at the expense of other items. This is manipulated experimentally by associating a single distinct feature with a higher reward value, such as a single red item in a list of black items. These findings may be more parsimoniously explained under a distinctiveness of encoding framework rather than a flexible attention allocation framework. The retrieval advantage for the prioritized list position may be because the incongruent feature stands out in the list perceptually and causes it to become better encoded. Across three visual working memory experiments, we contrast a flexible attention theory against a distinctiveness of encoding theory by manipulating the reward value associated with the incongruent feature. Findings from all three experiments show strong support in favor of the flexible attention theory and no support for the distinctiveness of encoding theory. We also evaluate and find no evidence that strategy use, motivation, or tiredness/fatigue associated with reward value can adequately explain flexible prioritization of attention. Flexible attentional prioritization effects may be best understood under the context of an online attentional refreshing mechanism.

Reward Expectation Differentially Modulates Global and Local Spatial Working Memory Accuracy

“…These results of cued-location memory are consistent with the proposal of flexible attention theory (Sandry et al, 2014;Sandry and Ricker, 2020), which suggests that the cognitive system assigns attention resources flexibly among items in working memory, and the elevation of working memory performance of a certain item is at the cost of performance of other items (Sandry et al, 2014;Allen and Ueno, 2018;Sandry and Ricker, 2020). In this research, to obtain a higher reward, goal-directed cognitive control may have inhibited the maintenance of reward-cue location and allocated saved resources to the maintenance of other locations in the delay phase.…”

“…However, empirical results have revealed a complex relationship between reward and working memory. Under some circumstances, reward did improve working memory performance (Gilbert and Fiez, 2004;Taylor et al, 2004;Rowe et al, 2008;Beck et al, 2010;Savine et al, 2010;Marquand et al, 2011;Kawasaki and Yamaguchi, 2013;Sandry et al, 2014;Choi et al, 2015;Hammer et al, 2015;Fairclough and Ewing, 2017;Hefer and Dreisbach, 2017;Heritage et al, 2017;Klink et al, 2017;Allen and Ueno, 2018;Anna and Anna, 2018;Thurm et al, 2018;Gaillard et al, 2019;Magis-Weinberg et al, 2019;Manga et al, 2020;Sandry and Ricker, 2020), while other studies did not find the reward effect on working memory accuracy (Pochon et al, 2002;Krawczyk et al, 2007;Beck et al, 2010;Hager et al, 2015;Infanti et al, 2017;Smith et al, 2017;Fairclough et al, 2018;Di Rosa et al, 2019). A potential factor mediating the reward effect is working memory load.…”

“…Specifically, motivational states might be identical in the three reward conditions until the presentation of the reward cue. Moreover, according to Sandry and Ricker (2020), the temporal position does affect performance in working memory tasks. Hence, the temporal position of reward cues should be considered in future studies.…”

How do we measure attention? Using factor analysis to establish construct validity of neuropsychological tests

“…Visual working memory (VWM) may seem like an odd choice to measure attention, especially when we are trying to distinguish between attention and working memory functions. However, VWM is a distinct, modality-specific memory store (Fougnie & Marois, 2011 ), and is tightly linked to selective attention, in that both encoding (Emrich et al, 2017 ; Praß & de Haan, 2019 ) and maintenance in VWM require visual attention (Makovski et al, 2008 ; Roper & Vecera, 2014 ; Sandry & Ricker, 2020 ). Huang et al ( 2012 ) used a Visual Short-Term Memory task requiring participants to memorize an array of six colors and then recreate this array from memory after it offset (i.e., full report paradigm).…”

Retrospective and prospective prioritization in visual working memory

“…For pre-prioritization, although we assume each item is attended during sequential presentation, spatial attention does not mandate WM storage (Allen, 2019;Oberauer, 2019); high value items may be more actively processed as they are encountered, leading to a stronger representation. They may also be prioritized over subsequently presented stimuli and possibly held in the FoA through attentional refreshing and/or visualisation (Camos et al, 2018;Hitch et al, 2020;Raye et al, 2002), operating either in a cyclical but biased manner, or through continuous 'online' refreshing (Johnson, 1992;Johnson et al, 2002;Sandry & Ricker, 2020).…”