Spatial Working Memory Interferes with Explicit, but Not Probabilistic Cuing of Spatial Attention

Recent empirical and theoretical work has depicted a close relationship between visual attention and visual working memory. For example, rehearsal in spatial working memory depends on spatial attention, whereas adding a secondary spatial working memory task impairs attentional deployment in visual s...

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Published inJournal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition Vol. 41; no. 3; pp. 787 - 806
Main Authors Won, Bo-Yeong, Jiang, Yuhong V
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States American Psychological Association 01.05.2015
Subjects
Adolescent
Adult
Attention
College Students
Comparative Analysis
Cues
Experimental Psychology
Experiments
Goal Orientation
Goals
Humans
Learning
Learning Processes
Memory, Short-Term
Minnesota
Photic Stimulation
Probability
Psychological Tests
Reaction Time
Recognition (Psychology)
Short Term Memory
Spatial Ability
Spatial Memory
Statistical Analysis
Visual Stimuli
Young Adult
Minnesota
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Summary:Recent empirical and theoretical work has depicted a close relationship between visual attention and visual working memory. For example, rehearsal in spatial working memory depends on spatial attention, whereas adding a secondary spatial working memory task impairs attentional deployment in visual search. These findings have led to the proposal that working memory is attention directed toward internal representations. Here, we show that the close relationship between these 2 constructs is limited to some but not all forms of spatial attention. In 5 experiments, participants held color arrays, dot locations, or a sequence of dots in working memory. During the memory retention interval, they performed a T-among-L visual search task. Crucially, the probable target location was cued either implicitly through location probability learning or explicitly with a central arrow or verbal instruction. Our results showed that whereas imposing a visual working memory load diminished the effectiveness of explicit cuing, it did not interfere with probability cuing. We conclude that spatial working memory shares similar mechanisms with explicit, goal-driven attention but is dissociated from implicitly learned attention.
ISSN:0278-7393
1939-1285
DOI:10.1037/xlm0000040