Attention Restores Discrete Items to Visual Short-Term Memory

Abstract

When a memory is forgotten, is it lost forever? Our study shows that selective attention can restore forgotten items to visual short-term memory (VSTM). In our two experiments, all stimuli presented in a memory array were designed to be equally task relevant during encoding. During the retention interval, however, participants were sometimes given a cue predicting which of the memory items would be probed at the end of the delay. This shift in task relevance improved recall for that item. We found that this type of cuing improved recall for items that otherwise would have been irretrievable, providing critical evidence that attention can restore forgotten information to VSTM. Psychophysical modeling of memory performance has confirmed that restoration of information in VSTM increases the probability that the cued item is available for recall but does not improve the representational quality of the memory. We further suggest that attention can restore discrete items to VSTM.

Setting and changing feature priorities in visual short-term memory

“…Whereas spatial retro-cues are known to strongly affect the content of visual memory (Astle et al, 2012;Griffin & Nobre, 2003;Landman et al, 2003;Makovski, Sussman, & Jiang, 2008;Murray, Nobre, Clark, Cravo, & Stokes, 2013;Rerko & Oberauer, 2013;Rerko, Souza, & Oberauer, 2014;Sligte et al, 2008), few studies have addressed the role of FBA during VSTM maintenance. In these studies, colored retrocues identified one of several colored objects held in memory and participants reproduced their orientation (Heuer & Schubö, 2016;Li & Saiki, 2015;Pertzov et al, 2013).…”

“…A valid retro-cue could stop this diffusion, or reduce interference with distractor orientations (Pertzov et al, 2013). Alternatively, the entire representation may fade out (Wei et al, 2012), be suddenly lost (Zhang & Luck, 2009), or no longer available for recall, unless selected by retrospective attention (Murray et al, 2013). A proper evaluation of these scenarios calls for a manipulation of set-size or incentives to trade off quality and quantity of memory representations (Fougnie, Cormiea, Kanabar, & Alvarez, 2016).…”

In search of the focus of attention in working memory: 13 years of the retro-cue effect

“…Participants have to judge in which direction (e.g., left or right) the probe stimulus has changed. The degree of displacement is varied, allowing researchers to measure precision as the slope of the psychometric function relating change identification accuracy to the size of a change, and the probability of reporting information from memory (as opposed to guessing) as the asymptote of the psychometric function at large sizes of change (Bays & Husain, 2008;Murray, Nobre, Clark, Cravo, & Stokes, 2013).…”

“…So far, all studies assessing retro-cue effects in continuous tasks have consistently reported benefits in the probability of retrieving the retro-cued item (Gunseli, van Moorselaar, Meeter, & Olivers, 2015;Makovski & Pertzov, 2015;Murray et al, 2013; Souza, manuscript submitted for publication; Souza, Rerko, Lin, & Oberauer, 2014;Souza, Rerko, & Oberauer, 2016;van Moorselaar, Gunseli, Theeuwes, & Olivers, 2015;Wallis, Stokes, Cousijn, Woolrich, & Nobre, 2015;Williams, Hong, Kang, Carlisle, & Woodman, 2013). Regarding the precision of recall as measured by the mixture model, the findings are mixed.…”

“…This baseline is usually preferred in studies measuring neural markers of attentional control (e.g., Griffin & Nobre, 2003;Kuo, Stokes, & Nobre, 2012;Lepsien, Griffin, Devlin, & Nobre, 2005;Lepsien et al, 2011;Myers, Walther, Wallis, Stokes, & Nobre, 2015;Nobre, Griffin, & Rao, 2008), because it equates the retro-cue and baseline trials in terms of the responses to perceptual stimulation. Studies that have included both no-cue and neutral-cue trials (Makovski, Sussman, & Jiang, 2008;Murray et al, 2013) have observed that performance does not differ between these conditions, provided that they are matched regarding overall retention interval (i.e., no-cue long vs. neutral cue).…”