0000000000381578
AUTHOR
Jiafeng Zhang
Strategic inhibition of distractors with visual working memory contents after involuntary attention capture
AbstractPrevious research has suggested that visual working memory (VWM) contents had a guiding effect on selective attention, and once participants realized that the distractors shared the same information with VWM contents in the search task, they would strategically inhibit the potential distractors with VWM contents. However, previous behavioral studies could not reveal the way how distractors with VWM contents are inhibited strategically. By employing the eye-tracking technique and a dual-task paradigm, we manipulated the probability of memory items occurring as distractors to explore this issue. Consistent with previous behavioral studies, the results showed that the inhibitory effect…
Electrophysiological evidence supports the role of sustained visuospatial attention in maintaining visual WM contents
Recent empirical and theoretical work suggests that there is a close relationship between visual working memory (WM) and visuospatial attention. Here, we investigated whether visuospatial attention was involved in maintaining object representations in visual WM. To this end, the alpha lateralization and contralateral delay activity (CDA) were analyzed as neural markers for visuospatial attention and visual WM storage, respectively. In the single-task condition, participants performed a grating change-detection task. To probe the role of visuospatial attention in maintaining WM contents, two color squares were presented above and below the fixation point during the retention interval, which …
Interval between two sequential arrays determines their storage state in visual working memory.
AbstractThe visual information can be stored as either “active” representations in the active state or “activity-silent” representations in the passive state during the retention period in visual working memory (VWM). Catering to the dynamic nature of visual world, we explored how the temporally dynamic visual input was stored in VWM. In the current study, the memory arrays were presented sequentially, and the contralateral delay activity (CDA), an electrophysiological measure, was used to identify whether the memory representations were transferred into the passive state. Participants were instructed to encode two sequential arrays and retrieve them respectively, with two conditions of int…
The passive state: A protective mechanism for information in working memory tasks.
Memory representations can be stored in a passive state in a visual working memory (VWM) task. However, it remains unclear whether the representations stored in the passive state are prone to interference and decay. To explore this issue, we asked participants to successively remember two sets of memory items (M1 and M2) in three test manners: a combined test (both M1 and M2 are probed simultaneously), a backward test (probe M2 first and M1 second), or a forward test (probe M1 first and M2 second). We found that the contralateral delay activity (CDA) amplitude after the onset of M2 only tracked M2 independently of M1 in the two separate tests (Experiments 1-3), and the accuracy of M1 was we…
Limitations of concurrently representing objects within view and in visual working memory
AbstractRepresenting visibly present stimuli is as limited in capacity as representing invisible stimuli in visual working memory (WM). In this study, we explored whether concurrently representing stimuli within view affects representing objects in visual WM, and if so, whether this effect is modulated by the storage states (active and silent state) of memory contents? In experiment 1, participants were asked to perform the change-detect task in a simultaneous-representing condition in which WM content and the continuously-visible stimuli in view were simultaneously represented, as well as a baseline condition in which only the representations of visual WM content were maintained. The resul…
The mechanism of retro-cue effect in visual working memory : Cognitive phase separation
Retro-cue effect (RCE) refers to the phenomenon that individuals can use retro-cues to improve their visual working memory (VWM) performance of target items after memory stimuli disappear. To explain the mechanism of RCE in VWM, five different hypotheses have been proposed by previous studies: the hypothesis of enhancing target representations, the hypothesis of forgetting non-target representations, the hypothesis of preventing memory degradation, the hypothesis of preventing interference from probe array and the hypothesis of cognitive phase separation. Although RCE has been repeatedly observed in previous studies, the mechanism of RCE remains unclear. In this study, we conducted three ex…