The mental wormhole: Internal attention shifts without regard for distance

Abstract

Attention operates perceptually on items in the environment, and internally on objects in visuospatial working memory. In the present study, we investigated whether spatial and temporal constraints affecting endogenous perceptual attention extend to internal attention. A retro-cue paradigm in which a cue is presented beyond the range of iconic memory and after stimulus encoding was used to manipulate shifts of internal attention. Participants' memories were tested for colored circles (Experiments 1, 2, 3a, 4) or for novel shapes (Experiment 3b) and their locations within an array. In these experiments, the time to shift internal attention (Experiments 1 and 3) and the eccentricity of encoded objects (Experiments 2-4) were manipulated. Our data showed that, unlike endogenous perceptual attention, internal shifts of attention are not modulated by stimulus eccentricity. Across several timing parameters and stimuli, we found that shifts of internal attention require a minimum quantal amount of time regardless of the object eccentricity at encoding. Our findings are consistent with the view that internal attention operates on objects whose spatial information is represented in relative terms. Although endogenous perceptual attention abides by the laws of space and time, internal attention can shift across spatial representations without regard for physical distance.

Feature-based and spatial attentional selection in visual working memory

“…For example, neuroimaging studies have found an additional involvement of certain medial and lateral prefrontal areas and stronger activations in parietal regions when the focus of attention is controlled within VWM (Nee & Jonides, 2009;Nobre et al, 2004;Tamber-Rosenau et al, 2011). Moreover, internal attention has also been shown to exhibit distinct behavioral characteristics: Unlike external shifts of attention, internal shifts of attention appear not to be influenced by the initial physical distance of the encoded objects, and beyond a certain threshold time, additional time for internal shifts does not yield additional benefits (Tanoue & Berryhill, 2012).…”

“…Moreover, it has been shown that the distance between objects at encoding does not affect the time it takes to shift internal attention between the respective representations (Tanoue & Berryhill, 2012).…”

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

“…These effects are not due to modulation of the response to a preferred perceptual stimulus over others (since no perceptual input is present), and no eye movement artifacts (e.g., Matsukura, Luck, & Vecera, 2007) or eccentricity effects (Tanoue & Berryhill, 2012) have been found to explain it.…”

“…A few studies have addressed this question by varying the temporal separation between the retro-cue and onset of the test display (hereafter, the cue-test delay). Tanoue and Berryhill (2012) varied the cue-test delay from 100 to 700 ms in a local-recognition task. Significant retro-cue benefits emerged after 300 ms, and they did not increase in size with longer cue-test delays.…”

A bilateral advantage for maintaining objects in visual short term memory

“…Specifically, those studies have shown that directing attention to the location of one previously encoded stimulus using retrocues subsequently enhances the recall of that stimulus (Berryhill, Richmond, Shay & Olson, 2012;Delvenne, Cleeremans, & Laloyaux, 2010;Griffin & Nobre, 2003;Landman, Spekreijse & Lamme, 2003;Lepsien, Griffin, Devlin & Nobre, 2005;Lepsein & Nobre, 2006;Makovski & Jiang, 2007;Makovski, Sussman & Jiang, 2008;Matsukura, Luck & Veraca, 2007;Nobre et al, 2004;Tanoue & Berryhill, 2012;Tanoue, Jones, Peterson & Berryhill, 2013, amongst others). Recent electrophysiological evidence suggests that retro-cues promote the selective access of relevant VSTM representations and bias processing in favour of those representations (Kuo, Stokes & Nobre, 2012).…”