Separate and combined effects of action relevance and motivational value on visual working memory

Heuer, Anna; Schubö, Anna

doi:10.1167/18.5.14

Cited by 20 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 50 publications

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“…Our findings are in accord with previous suggestions that people hold positively biased priors [12] and update their beliefs more in response to good than bad news [13,26–29]. We speculate that biased evidence accumulation could be due to biases in perception [30, 31], attention [32, 33] and/or working memory [34, 35]. For example, participants may have attended to desirable stimulus to a greater extent than the undesirable stimulus, such that the former were assigned greater weight when forming beliefs.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Evidence accumulation is biased by motivation: A computational account

2019

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To make good judgments people gather information. An important problem an agent needs to solve is when to continue sampling data and when to stop gathering evidence. We examine whether and how the desire to hold a certain belief influences the amount of information participants require to form that belief. Participants completed a sequential sampling task in which they were incentivized to accurately judge whether they were in a desirable state, which was associated with greater rewards than losses, or an undesirable state, which was associated with greater losses than rewards. While one state was better than the other, participants had no control over which they were in, and to maximize rewards they had to maximize accuracy. Results show that participants’ judgments were biased towards believing they were in the desirable state. They required a smaller proportion of supporting evidence to reach that conclusion and ceased gathering samples earlier when reaching the desirable conclusion. The findings were replicated in an additional sample of participants. To examine how this behavior was generated we modeled the data using a drift-diffusion model. This enabled us to assess two potential mechanisms which could be underlying the behavior: (i) a valence-dependent response bias and/or (ii) a valence-dependent process bias. We found that a valence-dependent model, with both a response bias and a process bias, fit the data better than a range of other alternatives, including valence-independent models and models with only a response or process bias. Moreover, the valence-dependent model provided better out-of-sample prediction accuracy than the valence-independent model. Our results provide an account for how the motivation to hold a certain belief decreases the need for supporting evidence. The findings also highlight the advantage of incorporating valence into evidence accumulation models to better explain and predict behavior.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Evidence accumulation is biased by motivation: A computational account

2019

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“…Actions, planned and executed during memory maintenance, bias visual working memory in favour of stimuli previously presented at the same location as the current action goal. This selection within visual working memory has been observed for both eye movements Hanning et al, 2016; and manual pointing movements Heuer & Schubö, 2018;. Studies in this new line of research combined movement tasks and memory tasks.…”

Section: Prioritization Of Action-relevant Locationsmentioning

confidence: 81%

Memory for action: a functional view of selection in visual working memory

2020

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Perception is shaped by actions, which determine the allocation of selective attention across the visual field. Here, we review evidence that maintenance in visual working memory is similarly influenced by actions (eye or hand movements), planned and executed well after encoding: Representations that are relevant for an upcoming actionbecause they spatially correspond to the action goal or because they are defined along action-related feature dimensionsare automatically prioritised over action-irrelevant representations and held in a stable state. We summarise what is known about specific characteristics and mechanisms of selection-for-action in working memory, such as its temporal dynamics and spatial specificity, and delineate open questions. This newly-burgeoning area of research promotes a more functional perspective on visual working memory that emphasizes its role in action control.

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“…It remains an open question, for instance, how saccadic selection would affect observers’ ability to retroactively deploy attention to one distinct location incongruent with the saccade target (using a valid retro cue), if that single location (rather than all incongruent locations) is most likely to be tested for memory performance. For instance, both reward and pointing movements influence visual memory maintenance when tested in separate experiments, but when tested in the same experiment reward affected memory performance only at the action-relevant location, whereas actions influenced memory performance irrespective of the reward manipulation ( Heuer & Schubö, 2018 ). In their study, the reward information was presented 200 ms before onset of the movement cue, thus providing also more time for voluntary selection than in the present study.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bold moves: Inevitable saccadic selection in visual short-term memory

Ohl

Rolfs

2020

Journal of Vision

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Selection for visual short-term memory ( vstm ) provides a basis for many cognitive functions. Saccadic eye movements sway this selection in favor of stimuli previously seen at locations congruent with their target. In three experiments, we provide converging evidence that this saccadic selection is implemented as a fundamental, inevitable selection process, rather than a top-down strategy. In particular, benefits for congruent over incongruent items were largely constant across set sizes ranging from two to eight items ( Experiment 1 ), showing that saccadic selection imposes priorities on vstm irrespective of memory load and is effective even when only few representations need to be maintained. Moreover, a decrement in performance for incongruent items occurred reliably, whether the congruent location contained a task-relevant item or an irrelevant noise patch ( Experiment 2 ). Finally, saccadic selection was immune to a strong manipulation of the observer's attentional priorities ( Experiment 3 ). Given the prevalence of saccades in natural vision, our results demonstrate a fundamental and ecologically relevant selection mechanism for vstm : Saccades systematically eliminate information seen at non-target locations, while information at the saccade target remains available to recall. This simple heuristic is effective in the absence of informative cues and may incapacitate voluntary selection mechanisms that are incongruent with ongoing movement plans.

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Separate and combined effects of action relevance and motivational value on visual working memory

Cited by 20 publications

References 50 publications

Evidence accumulation is biased by motivation: A computational account

Evidence accumulation is biased by motivation: A computational account

Memory for action: a functional view of selection in visual working memory

Bold moves: Inevitable saccadic selection in visual short-term memory

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