A psychological refractory period in access to visual short‐term memory and the deployment of visual–spatial attention: Multitasking processing deficits revealed by event‐related potentials

Abstract

In this psychological refractory period (PRP) experiment, a tone (T1) was presented, followed by a visual target (T2) embedded in a bilateral display, and a speeded response was required for each target. The T1-T2 stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was 300, 650, or 1000 ms. Mean response time to T2 increased as SOA was reduced, replicating the well-known PRP effect. Importantly, the N2pc component of the event-related potential was progressively attenuated as SOA was reduced, and the onset latency of the sustained posterior contralateral negativity (SPCN) that follows the N2pc was progressively lengthened. Conditional analysis based on Task1 difficulty corroborated the analyses based on effects of SOA. The results suggest that central processing leading to the PRP effect interferes with the deployment of visual-spatial attention (as indexed by the N2pc) and delays encoding into visual short-term memory (as indexed by the SPCN onset latency).

Do Arabic numerals activate magnitude automatically? Evidence from the psychological refractory period paradigm

“…Further, when a classification task is performed on a list of items maintained in working memory, a SNARC-like effect arises that reflects ordinal position in working memory (i.e., faster left-hand responses are executed in response to items located early in the ordinal sequence and faster right-hand responses are executed in response to items located late in the ordinal sequence; Ginsburg et al, 2014;van Dijck & Fias, 2011). Given evidence that central attention is involved in consolidating items into visual short-term memory (e.g., Brisson & Jolicoeur, 2007;Marois & Ivanoff, 2005), the present observation that the SNARC effect arose in the absence of central attention is inconsistent with the SNARC effect arising from temporary representations held in working memory. However, the present results would be consistent with the working memory account if it is assumed that working memory activates links between magnitude and space that are held in long-term memory (see Ginsburg et al, 2014 for a discussion of this account).…”

Electrophysiological evidence of central interference in the control of visuospatial attention

“…The present results cannot falsify this task preparation hypothesis, and more work will be required to determine whether the interference we observed in the present work arose because of central postponement (or capacity sharing) or because of task preparation. However, a follow-up study (Brisson & Jolicoeur, 2007), which produced a stepwise attenuation of N2pc amplitude across SOAs of 1,000, 650, and 300 msec, suggests that N2pc attenuation can be found under conditions that make differential preparation very unlikely.…”

Visual Search Demands Dictate Reliance on Working Memory Storage

“…The CDA has been shown to be an excellent marker for visual WM capacity allocation during change detection tasks (Vogel et al, 2005;McCollough et al, 2007). Importantly, the CDA has also been observed in tasks that required a mental manipulation of visual information even without an explicit delay period (Jolicoeur et al, 2006(Jolicoeur et al, , 2008Brisson and Jolicoeur, 2007;Drew and Vogel, 2008;Prime and Jolicoeur, 2010). For example, Drew and Vogel (2008) measured the CDA in a multiple object tracking task, while Prime and Jolicoeur (2010) used the CDA as an index of WM involvement during a mental rotation task.…”