The effect of perceptual interference on prioritization of feature dimensions in visual working memory

视觉工作记忆中回溯线索效应的影响因素 [The Influencing Factors of Retro-Cue Effect in Visual Working Memory]

The visual working memory is a temporary storage system, which encodes, maintains and retrieves visual information. The researchers have found that adding retro-cues to the maintenance phase of memory leads to changes in participants’ memory performance, which is the retro-cue effect. The magnitude of the retro-cue effect is not set in stone, but changes with the changes of its influencing factors. However, there is no study to summarize the influencing factors of the retro-clue effect. This paper looked into the articles related to the study of the retro-cue effect and summarized the influencing factors of the retro-cue effect: memory items, maintenance interval time, interference in maint…

不同情绪面孔的视觉工作记忆表现差异 [The Performance Difference of Visual Working Memory between Various Emotional Faces]

Among social-emotional stimuli, emotional faces occupy an important position, which specifically refer to human faces with certain facial expressions. The visual working memory is a limited workspace where information can be saved online and can be accessed and operated by advanced cognitive function during the maintenance period. A large number of behavioral and electrophysiological studies have shown that there are differences in visual working memory performance of different emotional faces. Specifically, angry faces can enhance the visual working memory performance; fearful faces may cause some damage to visual working memory; sad faces will impair face recognition encoding in visual wo…

视觉工作记忆存储的表征单位 [The Representation Unit of Visual Working Memory]

The visual working memory is a limited storage system in which people could flexibly process the representations to complete the task. Among studies on the capacity of visual working memory, the representation unit is a prior subject. Previous research employs the change-detection paradigm and the recall paradigm to explore the nature of representations when features of diverse dimensions and different-level features of the same dimension are stored in the visual working memory. These studies elicit two binary hypotheses: the object-based representation hypothesis backs that those diverse features are bound on the object and form a whole, while the feature-based representation hypothesis su…

Sustained attention required for effective dimension-based retro-cue benefit in visual working memory

In visual working memory (VWM) tasks, participants’ performances can be improved through the use of dimension-based retro-cues, which direct internal attention to prioritize a particular dimension (e.g., color or orientation) of VWM representations even after the stimuli disappear. This phenomenon is known as the dimension-based retro-cue benefit (RCB). The present study investigates whether sustained attention is required for the dimension-based RCB by inserting interference or interruption between the retro-cue and the test array to distract attention. We tested the effects of perceptual interference or cognitive interruption on dimension-based RCB when the interference (Experiments 1 and…