The visual familiarity effect on attentional working memory maintenance.

Attentional refreshing has been described as an attention-based, domain-general maintenance mechanism in working memory. It is thought to operate via focusing executive attention on information held in working memory, protecting it from temporal decay and interference. Although attentional refreshing has attracted a lot of research, its functioning is still debated. At least one conception of refreshing supposes that it relies on semantic long-term memory representations to reconstruct working memory traces. Although investigations in the verbal domain found evidence against this hypothesis, a different pattern could emerge in visuospatial working memory in which absence of refreshing evidence has been observed for stimuli with minimal associated long-term knowledge. In a series of four experiments, the current study investigated the hypothesis of an involvement of semantic long-term representations in the functioning of attentional refreshing in the visuospatial domain. Both cognitive and memory load effects have been proposed as indexes of attentional refreshing. Therefore, we investigated the interaction between the effects of visual familiarity (a long-term memory effect) and cognitive load on recall performance (Experiments 1A and 1B), as well as the interaction between the effects of visual familiarity and memory load on the response times in a concurrent processing task (Experiments 2A and 2B). Results were consistent across experiments and go against the hypothesis of the involvement of semantic long-term memory in the functioning of attentional refreshing in visuospatial working memory. As such, this study corroborates the results found in the verbal domain. Implications for attentional refreshing and working memory are discussed.

Accessibility of working memory representations in the focus of attention: Heightened or reduced?

Many researchers agree that information residing in the focus of attention in working memory benefits from a boost in memory strength and activation, as well as heightened accessibility. However, recent studies have questioned this heightened accessibility. More specifically, these recent studies found reduced accessibility for an item in the focus of attention compared to another item in working memory, which was referred to as an "inhibition-of-return-like" effect. Our study aimed to provide a detailed examination of the accessibility of information in the focus of attention. Across a series of experiments, varying task characteristics related to the time course of the effect (Experiments 2-3) and the potential role of response inhibition (Experiments 4a-4b), we repeatedly failed to find evidence for an inhibition-of-return-like effect. Instead, we mostly found heightened accessibility for an item in the focus of attention. Given that an inhibition-of-return-like effect seems to be limited to a very specific task condition, reduced accessibility of information in the focus of attention appears to be far from a general phenomenon. Therefore, based on our findings, we propose that information in the focus of attention generally benefits from heightened accessibility, although there may be factors, most likely unrelated to the functioning of the focus of attention, that could sometimes mask this and even result in data patterns that are consistent with reduced accessibility. The theoretical implications for the focus of attention and working memory are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Decoding the content of working memory in school-aged children.

Developmental improvements in working memory (WM) maintenance predict many real-world outcomes, including educational attainment. It is thus critical to understand which WM mechanisms support these behavioral improvements, and how WM maintenance strategies might change through development. One challenge is that specific WM neural mechanisms cannot easily be measured behaviorally, especially in a child population. However, new multivariate decoding techniques have been designed, primarily in adult populations, that can sensitively decode the contents of WM. The goal of this study was to deploy multivariate decoding techniques known to decode memory representations in adults to decode the contents of WM in children. We created a simple computerized WM game for children, in which children maintained different categories of information (visual, spatial or verbal). We collected electroencephalography (EEG) data from 20 children (7-12-year-olds) while they played the game. Using Multivariate Pattern Analysis (MVPA) on children's EEG signals, we reliably decoded the category of the maintained information during the sensory and maintenance period. Across exploratory reliability and validity analyses, we examined the robustness of these results when trained on less data, and how these patterns generalized within individuals throughout the testing session. Furthermore, these results matched theory-based predictions of WM across individuals and across ages. Our proof-of-concept study proposes a direct and age-appropriate potential alternative to exclusively behavioral WM maintenance measures in children. Our study demonstrates the utility of MVPA to measure and track the uninstructed representational content of children's WM. Future research could use our technique to investigate children's WM maintenance and strategies.

The effect of multisensory distraction on working memory: A role for task relevance?

There is growing recognition that working memory and selective attention are highly related. However, a key function of selective attention-ignoring distractors-is much less understood in the domain of working memory. In the attention domain, it is now clear that distractors' task relevance and stimulation of multiple senses at a time (i.e., being multisensory), affect how much such information can distract from the main task, and that load modulates these effects. Here, we examined the effects of the task relevance and multisensory nature of distractors on working memory performance under high and low memory load, aiming to clarify whether distracting information similarly affects selective attention performance and working memory performance. We proposed a multiexperiment research plan involving up to three consecutive experiments, based on an initial online study (Experiment 0) with fully task-irrelevant distractors. There, we found conclusive evidence against a difference in how unisensory and multisensory distractors affected working memory performance. The next study, Experiment 1, replicated these results. However, when distractors were made partly task relevant in the subsequent Experiment 2d, multisensory distractors disrupted working memory performance more than unisensory distractors on average. However, closer nonpreregistered inspection revealed that multisensory distractors were actually only more disruptive than auditory distractors, and similarly as disruptive as visual distractors. Thus, overall, there was no strong evidence for multisensory distractors being more disruptive to working memory performance than unisensory distractors. Taken together, these experiments constitute a novel and detailed investigation of the impact of distracting information on working memory performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

To be or not to be relevant: Comparing short- and long-term consequences across working memory prioritization procedures.

Priority-based allocation of attentional resources has shown robust effects in working memory (WM) with both cue-based and reward-based prioritization. However, direct comparisons between these effects in WM are needed. Additionally, the consequences of WM prioritization for remembering in the long term remain unclear for both prioritization procedures. Here, we tested and compared the immediate and long-term memory (LTM) effects of cue-based versus reward-based retrospective prioritization of WM content. Participants encoded four memory items and were then indicated to prioritize one of the items through the presentation of either a retro-cue or a reward pattern. We then tested their immediate and delayed memory. The results of the first experiment showed better memory for prioritized than for unprioritized information in WM and LTM, but the WM effect was driven solely by the retro-cue, making it difficult to interpret any reward-based effects in LTM. In the second experiment, using a more explicit and meaningful reward-based manipulation, the results showed a prioritization benefit in WM for both prioritization procedures. In LTM, however, the prioritization effect was predominantly driven by the retro-cue manipulation. Taken together, we found that (1) the way in which attention is directed in WM impacts the size of the prioritization benefit in WM, (2) WM prioritization generally results in a prioritization effect in LTM, and (3) that the effect in LTM is more robust for cue-based prioritization. Exploratory analyses indicated that the LTM effect of cue-based prioritization reflected a cost in performance for noncued items rather than a benefit for cued items.

Feature identity determines representation structure in working memory.

Visual working memory maintains both continuous-perceptual information and discrete-categorical information about memory items. Both types of information are represented in working memory, but the representation structure remains unknown. Continuous and categorical information about a single stimulus could be represented separately, in two different representations. Alternatively, continuous and categorical information could be represented jointly as a single representation. To investigate this, we fitted two different computational models to delayed estimation data assuming either separate or joint representations of continuous and categorical information in working memory, for three different, commonly used features (orientation, color, and shape). Across a set of nine experiments, model fits clearly show that feature identity drives the representation structure, with a joint-representation structure for orientation, but a separate-representations structure for color and shape. This pattern was remarkably invariant across a variety of task contexts. Existing models miss this distinction, leading to mischaracterization of memory precision. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Attentional switching between perception and memory: Examining asymmetrical switch costs.

Attention can be defined as a mechanism for the selection and prioritization of elements among many. When attention is directed to a specific piece of information, this information is assumed to be in the focus of attention. On a day-to-day basis, we need to rely on efficient switching between information we are holding in working memory (internal modality) and information presented in the world around us (external modality). A recent set of studies investigated between-modality attentional switches and found that there is an asymmetrical switch cost for switching between the internal and external focus of attention (Verschooren et al., 2020, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 46[9], 912-925; Verschooren, Liefooghe, et al., 2019a, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 45[10], 1399-1414). In particular, participants switched on a trial-by-trial basis between an internal task using stimuli retrieved from memory and an external task using on-screen presented stimuli. A larger cost was found when switching from the external modality towards the internal modality than the other way around. The authors found that this cost asymmetry could be best explained in terms of associative interference (i.e., differences in shielding efficiency against the memory traces from the competing task set). The present study aimed to replicate the asymmetrical switch cost (Experiment 1) and investigate whether an alternative explanation in terms of stimulus strength can account for the asymmetrical switch cost (Experiment 2). Overall, the results confirm the presence of a subtle, asymmetrical switch cost, but we observed little to no contribution of stimulus strength.

Decoding the content of working memory in school-aged children.

Developmental improvements in working memory (WM) maintenance predict many real-world outcomes, including educational attainment. It is thus critical to understand which WM mechanisms support these behavioral improvements, and how WM maintenance strategies might change through development. One challenge is that specific WM neural mechanisms cannot easily be measured behaviorally, especially in a child population. However, new multivariate decoding techniques have been designed, primarily in adult populations, that can sensitively decode the contents of WM. The goal of this study was to deploy multivariate decoding techniques known to decode memory representations in adults to decode the contents of WM in children. We created a simple computerized WM game for children, in which children maintained different categories of information (visual, spatial or verbal). We collected electroencephalography (EEG) data from 20 children (7-12-year-olds) while they played the game. Using Multivariate Pattern Analysis (MVPA) on children's EEG signals, we reliably decoded the category of the maintained information during the sensory and maintenance period. Across exploratory reliability and validity analyses, we examined the robustness of these results when trained on less data, and how these patterns generalized within individuals throughout the testing session. Furthermore, these results matched theory-based predictions of WM across individuals and across ages. Our proof-of-concept study proposes a direct and age-appropriate potential alternative to exclusively behavioral WM maintenance measures in children. Our study demonstrates the utility of MVPA to measure and track the uninstructed representational content of children's WM. Future research could use our technique to investigate children's WM maintenance and strategies.

From Lab-Testing to Web-Testing in Cognitive Research: Who You Test is More Important than how You Test.

The transition to web-testing, although promising, entails many new concerns. Web-testing is harder to monitor, so researchers need to ensure that the quality of the data collected is comparable to the quality of data typically achieved by lab-testing. Our study yields a novel contribution to this issue, by being the first to distinguish between the impact of web-testing and the impact of sourcing individuals from different participant pools, including crowdsourcing platforms. We presented a fairly general working memory task to 196 MTurk participants, 300 Prolific participants, and 255 students from the University of Geneva, allowing for a comparison of data quality across different participant pools. Among university students, 215 were web-tested, and 40 were lab-tested, allowing for a comparison of testing modalities within the same participant pool. Data quality was measured by assessing multiple data characteristics (i.e., reaction time, accuracy, anomalous values) and the presence of two behavioral benchmark effects. Our results revealed that who you test (i.e., participant pool) is more important than how you test (i.e., testing modality). Concerning how you test, our results showed that web-testing incurs a small, yet acceptable loss of data quality compared to lab-testing. Concerning who you test, Prolific participants were almost indistinguishable from web-tested students, but MTurk participants differed drastically from the other pools. Our results therefore encourage the use of web-testing in the domain of cognitive psychology, even when using complex paradigms. Nevertheless, these results urge for caution regarding how researchers select web-based participant pools when conducting online research.

Is the Other-Race Effect in Working Memory Due to Attentional Refreshing?

The other-race effect is the observation that faces from another ethnicity induce worst recall performance than faces from one's own ethnicity. This effect has been defined as a type of familiarity effect, with more familiar faces better recalled than less familiar faces. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that a working memory maintenance mechanism called attentional refreshing mediates the other-race effect and that faces from one's own ethnicity are refreshed more efficiently than faces from other ethnicities. In two experiments, face ethnicity was orthogonally manipulated with cognitive load of a concurrent processing task in a complex-span paradigm (Exp. 1) and with the memory load in a Brown-Peterson paradigm (Exp. 2). Both cognitive and memory load effects are indices of the functioning of attentional refreshing. Testing Caucasian young adults, Caucasian and East-Asian faces were contrasted. Results from both experiments were congruent and against our initial hypothesis. The other-race effect in working memory does not appear to be supported by attentional refreshing. Furthermore, the results are congruent with the idea that faces as a whole are not maintained in working memory via attentional refreshing.

A (further) test of spontaneous serial refreshing in verbal and spatial working memory.

Working memory is the cognitive system that keeps a limited amount of information temporarily accessible for ongoing cognition. One proposed mechanism to keep information active in working memory is refreshing. Refreshing is assumed to operate serially, reactivating memory items one by one by bringing them into the focus of attention during retention. We report two experiments in which we examine evidence for the spontaneous occurrence of serial refreshing in verbal working memory (Experiment 1, using letters as memoranda) and in visuospatial working memory (Experiment 2, using locations as memoranda). Participants had to remember series of red memory items, and black probes were presented between these memory items, with each probe to be judged present in or absent from the list presented so far, as quickly as possible (i.e., the probe-span task). Response times to the probes were used to examine whether the content of the focus of attention changed over time, as would be expected if serial refreshing occurs spontaneously during interitem pauses. Contrary to this hypothesis, our results indicate that the last-presented memory item remained in the focus of attention during the interitem pauses of the probe-span tasks. These findings confirm the boundary conditions of spontaneous serial refreshing that were previously observed for verbal working memory and extend them to visuospatial working memory. Implications for working memory maintenance are discussed.

Encode a Letter and Get Its Location for Free? Assessing Incidental Binding of Verbal and Spatial Features.

Previous studies have demonstrated that when presented with a display of spatially arranged letters, participants seem to remember the letters' locations when letters are the focus of a recognition test, but do not remember letters' identity when locations are tested. This strong binding asymmetry suggests that encoding location may be obligatory when remembering letters, which requires explanation within theories of working memory. We report two studies in which participants focused either on remembering letters or locations for a short interval. At test, positive probes were either intact letter-location combinations or recombinations of an observed letter and another previously occupied location. Incidental binding is observed when intact probes are recognized more accurately or faster than recombined probes. Here, however, we observed no evidence of incidental binding of location to letter in either experiment, neither under conditions where participants focused on one feature exclusively for a block, nor where the to-be-remembered feature was revealed prior to encoding with a changing pre-cue, nor where the to-be-remembered feature was retro-cued and therefore unknown during encoding. Our results call into question the robustness of a strong, consistent binding asymmetry. They suggest that while incidental location-to-letter binding may sometimes occur, it is not obligatory.

Boundary conditions for observing cognitive load effects in visual working memory.

When holding information in working memory, the proportion of time occupied by a concurrent task determines memory performance. This effect, the cognitive load effect, has been replicated many times. Recent work has referred to it as a law of cognition (Barrouillet, Portrat, & Camos, Psychological review, 118(2), 175-192, 2011) and a Priority-A Benchmark of working memory (Oberauer et al., Psychological bulletin, 144(9), 885-958, 2018), making it an important effect for all models of working memory to explain. Despite this, some recent work has demonstrated conditions under which this law does not apply, bringing into question its generalizability. The present work investigates the boundary conditions of the cognitive load effect in visual working memory. We show that only under specific circumstances is cognitive load crucial to visual working memory performance. Moreover, the data indicate that the theoretical underpinnings assumed to underlie the cognitive load effect, maintenance in the face of continued forgetting, may be incorrect, at least in visual working memory. We propose that cognitive load effects may reflect enrichment of the memory representation in low cognitive load task situations, not mitigation of ongoing forgetting.

Storage and processing in working memory: A single, domain-general resource explains multitasking.

An ongoing major debate centers around whether multitasking in working memory, that is, performing several mental activities at once, is supported by multiple specialized domain-specific or by a single-purpose domain-general cognitive resources. Working memory theories differ in their explanations and predictions about when performing two mental tasks causes performance failures, versus when two processes can be carried out concurrently with negligible cognitive costs. In particular, the predictions of domain-specific and domain-general views on working memory are in conflict with one another when it comes to the cognitive cost associated with concurrent verbal and visuospatial processing and storage tasks. Previous tests of these predictions using traditional methods have led to ambiguous and inconsistent conclusions, however. To make critical progress in this theoretical debate, we used a radically different approach combining Bayesian state-trace analysis with an experimental design fully crossing processing and storage tasks differing only in the domain of representation (verbal vs. visuospatial). Across two experiments, we show unambiguously that a single, domain-general factor can account for briefly maintaining verbal and visuospatial information in a multitasking scenario. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Stuck on the Last: The Last-Presented Benefit as an Index of Attentional Refreshing in Adolescents.

Working memory is a limited-capacity system responsible for maintaining information that is known to dramatically develop throughout childhood and adolescence. Different maintenance mechanisms are proposed to support working memory development, among which is attentional refreshing. Attentional refreshing is assumed to improve the accessibility of working-memory representations by cycling attention from one mental representation to the other, serially. It has been suggested that the efficiency of refreshing increases between the ages of 7 and 14 years old, thereby supporting working memory development. Yet, there is not much research about refreshing in adolescence. Here, we investigate the occurrence of refreshing in 15-year-olds by using a recently-developed index, i.e., the last-presented benefit. Adolescents had to remember a list of four letters and judge whether a subsequent probe letter was present or not in the list. Reaction times to the probe were used to assess the spontaneous occurrence of refreshing. We found that, unlike young adults, 15-year-olds showed consistent speeded responses to probes matching the last-presented memory item, indicating that, in this task, adolescents did not refocus their attention away from the last memory item to initiate refreshing. Implications for working memory functioning and development are discussed.

Lexical access speed and the development of phonological recoding during immediate serial recall.

A recent Registered Replication Report (RRR) of the development of verbal rehearsal during serial recall (Elliott et al., 2021) revealed that children verbalized at younger ages than previously thought (Flavell et al., 1966), but did not identify sources of individual differences. Here we use mediation analysis to reanalyze data from the 934 children ranging from 5 to 10 years old from the RRR for that purpose. From ages 5 to 7, the time taken for a child to label pictures (i.e. isolated naming speed) predicted the child's spontaneous use of labels during a visually-presented serial reconstruction task, despite no need for spoken responses. For 6- and 7-year-olds, isolated naming speed also predicted recall. The degree to which verbalization mediated the relation between isolated naming speed and recall changed across development. All relations dissipated by age 10. The same general pattern was observed in an exploratory analysis of delayed recall for which greater demands are placed on rehearsal for item maintenance. Overall, our findings suggest that spontaneous phonological recoding during a standard short-term memory task emerges around age 5, increases in efficiency during the early elementary school years, and is sufficiently automatic by age 10 to support immediate serial recall in most children. Moreover, the findings highlight the need to distinguish between phonological recoding and rehearsal in developmental studies of short-term memory.

Inhibition-of-return-like effects in working memory? A preregistered replication study of Johnson et al. (2013).

The present study concerns a preregistered replication of the study conducted by Johnson et al. (Johnson et al. 2013 Psychol. Sci. 24, 1104-1112 (doi:10.1177/0956797612466414)), in which they showed an inhibition-of-return-like effect in working memory. Inhibition of return is a well-known phenomenon observed in the field of perception and refers to the observation that it takes longer to look back at a location which has recently been explored than to look at an unexplored location. Working memory is a central concept in the field of cognitive psychology and refers to the capacity to process and maintain information simultaneously over short periods of time. Johnson's study applied the inhibition of return paradigm to the concept of working memory. Their results showed that it is harder to access a working memory representation that had just been thought of, i.e. refreshed, in comparison to an unrefreshed working memory representation. Contrary to this study of Johnson et al., who observed refreshing to result in inhibitory processes, most studies on refreshing have described its effect as increasing/prolonging the level of activation of the memory representations. In an attempt to integrate these opposite patterns produced by 'refreshing', we started by replicating one of the studies on the inhibition of return in working memory reported by Johnson et al.

The use of attention to maintain information in working memory: A developmental investigation of spontaneous refreshing in school-aged children.

The capacity of working memory is limited and undergoes important developmental changes during childhood. One proposed reason for the expansion of working memory capacity during childhood is the emergence and increased efficiency of active maintenance mechanisms, such as that of refreshing. Refreshing is a proposed mechanism to keep information active in working memory by bringing memory items back into the focus of attention. One prevalent view is that the spontaneous use of refreshing emerges around the age of 7 and becomes more efficient during middle childhood and beyond. Using a novel approach to examine refreshing in children in Experiment 1, we show, against common conceptions, that simply giving free time in a basic working memory task does not lead to spontaneous refreshing in 9-12-year-old children. Instead, their focus of attention appears to linger on the last-presented memory item, even when ample time for refreshing is provided. Experimentally imposing the use of refreshing in Experiment 2, however, showed that children in this age range are able to switch their focus of attention away from the last-presented item in switch to another memory item. Thus, the current study uncovers that children in middle childhood do not always spontaneously switch attention away from the last-presented memory item to refresh the entire list, even though they are able to switch attention away from the last-presented memory item when instructed to do so. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

The Time-Course of the Last-Presented Benefit in Working Memory: Shifts in the Content of the Focus of Attention.

Working memory is a cognitive system responsible for maintaining information. It is often assumed to contain different states of accessibility of information, which is highest for an item held in the focus of attention. Evidence for this heightened accessibility usually comes from item-recognition tasks, in which a memory list is followed by a probe to be judged as being present in or absent from the list. Probes corresponding to the last-presented list item are usually recognized faster than probes corresponding to any other list item (i.e., the last-presented benefit), an effect that is often explained by the last-presented item being in the focus of attention. The last-presented benefit usually disappears when a long retention interval is inserted between the presentation of the list items and the probe. This raises the question of how long the last-presented item remains in the focus of attention. The present study gradually manipulates the retention interval between the presentation of the list of items and the probe in an item-recognition task in order to pinpoint when the focus of attention switches away from the last-presented list item. The results show that the last-presented benefit decreases over time when the retention interval is gradually extended from 0 ms to 200 ms, 400 ms and 500 ms, and completely disappears as of 750 ms. The cognitive mechanisms that may be involved in the time course of the last-presented benefit are discussed.

Consistent Failure to Produce a Cognitive Load Effect in Visual Working Memory Using a Standard Dual-Task Procedure.

Working memory performance is impaired when an attention-demanding task is executed during memory retention. The cognitive load effect is the consistent finding that the size of the memory impairment is determined by the relative amount of time that the secondary processing task occupies attention during memory retention. Cognitive load has been proposed to be a Priority-A benchmark any model of working memory should be able to explain (Oberauer et al., 2018), in part because the effect appears to generalize across different experimental procedures and materials. Using a standard dual-task procedure, we detail four experiments using a visual working memory recall task, two requiring memory for low-level features and two requiring memory for canonical angles (up, down, left, right, etc.). In all four experiments, we failed to find a cognitive load effect, calling into question the generality of the cognitive load effect and whether it is driving forgetting in multitasking contexts.