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Where to attend next: guiding refreshing of visual, spatial, and verbal representations in working memory.

  • Souza AS Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
  • Vergauwe E Department of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
  • Oberauer K Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
  • 2018-04-24
Published in:
  • Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. - 2018
attention
cuing
refreshing
short-term memory
working memory
Adult
Attention
Cues
Female
Humans
Male
Memory, Short-Term
Mental Recall
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Verbal Learning
English One of the functions that attention may serve in working memory (WM) is boosting information accessibility, a mechanism known as attentional refreshing. Refreshing is assumed to be a domain-general process operating on visual, spatial, and verbal representations alike. So far, few studies have directly manipulated refreshing of individual WM representations to measure the WM benefits of refreshing. Recently, a guided-refreshing method was developed, which consists of presenting cues during the retention interval of a WM task to instruct people to refresh (i.e., attend to) the cued items. Using a continuous-color reconstruction task, previous studies demonstrated that the error in reporting a color varies linearly with the frequency with which it was refreshed. Here, we extend this approach to assess the WM benefits of refreshing different representation types, from colors to spatial locations and words. Across six experiments, we show that refreshing frequency modulates performance in all stimulus domains in accordance with the tenet that refreshing is a domain-general process in WM. The benefits of refreshing were, however, larger for visual-spatial than verbal materials.
Language
  • English
Open access status
green
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Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/global/documents/274650
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