More Like this

1. Multiple states in visual working memory: Evidence from oculomotor capture by memory-matching distractors

   Beck, Valerie M. ; Vickery, Timothy J. ( April 2019 , Psychonomic bulletin review)

   Visual working memory (VWM) representations interact with attentional guidance, but there is controversy over whether multiple VWM items simultaneously influence attentional guidance. Extant studies relied on continuous variables like response times, which can obscure capture – especially if VWM representations cycle through interactive and non-interactive states. Previous conflicting findings regarding guidance when under high working memory (WM) load may be due to the use of noisier response time measures that mix capture and non-capture trials. Thus, we employed an oculomotor paradigm to characterize discrete attentional capture events under both high and low VWM load. Participants held one or two colors in memory, then executed a saccade to a target disk. On some trials, a distractor (sometimes VWM-matching) appeared simultaneously with the target. Eye movements were more frequently directed to a VWM-matching than a non-matching distractor for both load conditions. However, oculomotor capture by a VWM-matching distractor occurred less frequently under high compared with low load. These results suggest that attention is automatically guided toward items matching only one of two colors held in memory at a time, suggesting that items in VWM may cycle through attention-guiding and not-guiding states when more than one item is held in VWM and the task does not require that multiple items be maintained in an active, attention-guiding state. 

   more » « less
2. Trauma moderates the development of the oscillatory dynamics serving working memory in a sex-specific manner

   https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhac008  

   Killanin, Abraham D ; Embury, Christine M ; Picci, Giorgia ; Heinrichs-Graham, Elizabeth ; Wang, Yu-Ping ; Calhoun, Vince D ; Stephen, Julia M ; Wilson, Tony W ( February 2022 , Cerebral Cortex)

   Abstract Working memory, the ability to hold items in memory stores for further manipulation, is a higher order cognitive process that supports many aspects of daily life. Childhood trauma has been associated with altered cognitive development including particular deficits in verbal working memory (VWM), but the neural underpinnings remain poorly understood. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) studies of VWM have reliably shown decreased alpha activity in left-lateralized language regions during encoding, and increased alpha activity in parieto-occipital cortices during the maintenance phase. In this study, we examined whether childhood trauma affects behavioral performance and the oscillatory dynamics serving VWM using MEG in a cohort of 9- to 15-year-old youth. All participants completed a modified version of the UCLA Trauma History Profile and then performed a VWM task during MEG. Our findings indicated a sex-by-age-by-trauma three-way interaction, whereby younger females experiencing higher levels of trauma had the lowest d’ accuracy scores and the strongest positive correlations with age (i.e. older performed better). Likewise, females with higher levels of childhood trauma exhibited altered age-related alpha changes during the maintenance phase within the right temporal and parietal cortices. These findings suggest that trauma exposure may alter the developmental trajectory of neural oscillations serving VWM processing in a sex-specific way. 

   more » « less
3. Conceptual knowledge shapes visual working memory for complex visual information

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-12137-0  

   Sims, Chris R. ; Lerch, Rachel A. ; Tarduno, John A. ; Jacobs, Robert A. ( May 2022 , Scientific Reports)

   Human visual working memory (VWM) is a memory store people use to maintain the visual features of objects and scenes. Although it is obvious that bottom-up information influences VWM, the extent to which top-down conceptual information influences VWM is largely unknown. We report an experiment in which groups of participants were trained in one of two different categories of geologic faults (left/right lateral, or normal/reverse faults), or received no category training. Following training, participants performed a visual change detection task in which category knowledge was irrelevant to the task. Participants were more likely to detect a change in geologic scenes when the changes crossed a trained categorical distinction (e.g., the left/right lateral fault boundary), compared to within-category changes. In addition, participants trained to distinguish left/right lateral faults were more likely to detect changes when the scenes were mirror images along the left/right dimension. Similarly, participants trained to distinguish normal/reverse faults were more likely to detect changes when scenes were mirror images along the normal/reverse dimension. Our results provide direct empirical evidence that conceptual knowledge influences VWM performance for complex visual information. An implication of our results is that cognitive scientists may need to reconceptualize VWM so that it is closer to “conceptual short-term memory”.

    

   more » « less
4. Feature-based attention warps the perception of visual features

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-33488-2  

   Chapman, Angus F. ; Chunharas, Chaipat ; Störmer, Viola S. ( April 2023 , Scientific Reports)

   Selective attention improves sensory processing of relevant information but can also impact the quality of perception. For example, attention increases visual discrimination performance and at the same time boosts apparent stimulus contrast of attended relative to unattended stimuli. Can attention also lead to perceptual distortions of visual representations? Optimal tuning accounts of attention suggest that processing is biased towards “off-tuned” features to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio in favor of the target, especially when targets and distractors are confusable. Here, we tested whether such tuning gives rise to phenomenological changes of visual features. We instructed participants to select a color among other colors in a visual search display and subsequently asked them to judge the appearance of the target color in a 2-alternative forced choice task. Participants consistently judged the target color to appear more dissimilar from the distractor color in feature space. Critically, the magnitude of these perceptual biases varied systematically with the similarity between target and distractor colors during search, indicating that attentional tuning quickly adapts to current task demands. In control experiments we rule out possible non-attentional explanations such as color contrast or memory effects. Overall, our results demonstrate that selective attention warps the representational geometry of color space, resulting in profound perceptual changes across large swaths of feature space. Broadly, these results indicate that efficient attentional selection can come at a perceptual cost by distorting our sensory experience.

    

   more » « less
5. Long-term memory and working memory compete and cooperate to guide attention

   https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-022-02593-1  

   Hirschstein, Zall ; Aly, Mariam ( October 2022 , Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics)

   Multiple types of memory guide attention: Both long-term memory (LTM) and working memory (WM) effectively guide visual search. Furthermore, both types of memories can capture attention automatically, even when detrimental to performance. It is less clear, however, how LTM and WM cooperate or compete to guide attention in the same task. In a series of behavioral experiments, we show that LTM and WM reliably cooperate to guide attention: Visual search is faster when both memories cue attention to the same spatial location (relative to when only one memory can guide attention). LTM and WM competed to guide attention in more limited circumstances: Competition only occurred when these memories were in different dimensions – particularly when participants searched for a shape and held an accessory color in mind. Finally, we found no evidence for asymmetry in either cooperation or competition: There was no evidence that WM helped (or hindered) LTM-guided search more than the other way around. This lack of asymmetry was found despite differences in LTM-guided and WM-guided search overall, and differences in how two LTMs and two WMs compete or cooperate with each other to guide attention. This work suggests that, even if only one memory is currently task-relevant, WM and LTM can cooperate to guide attention; they can also compete when distracting features are salient enough. This work elucidates interactions between WM and LTM during attentional guidance, adding to the literature on costs and benefits to attention from multiple active memories. 

   more » « less