Mayer,1 alard roebroeck,2 konrad maurer,1 and david e. Working memory capacity an overview sciencedirect topics. Working memory is a temporary memory system in which information is maintained and manipulated for a short period of time. This idea has received considerable empirical support from studies of the attentional capture effect in visual search. Encoding strategy and not visual working memory capacity. This study uses a combination of tms, fmri and eeg to provide causal evidence for the role of the prefrontal cortex in the modulation of selective attention. During the retention interval, a secondary object, irrelevant to the memory. Even though working memory has received much interest from researchers in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, remarkably little is known about the mechanisms on which it depends, or about the factors that set its limits. Taskinduced brain deactivations dissociate between visual working memory and attention jutta s. Guidance of visual attention from working memory contents.
Guidance of visual attention from working memory contents depends on stimulus attributes bao zhang a, john x. The handoff of the attentional template from working memory after repeated search. Does maintaining bindings in visual working memory require. Visual working memory depends on attentional filtering. Visual working memory wm capacity is correlated with the magnitude of attentional capture by salient, taskirrelevant stimuli 35, 36, an effect that is thought to re. Linden3 1department of psychiatry, goetheuniversity, 60528 frankfurt, germany 2faculty of psychology and neuroscience, department of.
There is conflicting evidence on whether the capacity of visual working memory vwm reflects a central capacity limit that also influences intelligence. Participants performed a color changedetection task. It is generally considered that working memory wm capacity is limited and that wm capacity affects cognitive processes. Working memory is important for reasoning and the guidance of decisionmaking and behavior. Visual attention modulates phenomenal consciousness. Separating memoranda in depth increases visual working memory. Visual working memory vwm is a system to actively maintain visual. The interplay between working memory and visual perception has been the subject of considerable debate. Background the limited capacity of visual working memory vwm. Interactions between visual working memory an d visual. The relationship between visual attention and visual. In addition, this method allowed us to directly observe the shift from working memory to longterm memory representations controlling attention as learning occurred and experience accrued searching for the same target object. Indeed, a recent approach to vwm has proposed that an attentional filtering. Visual working memory vwm allows us to actively represent a limited amount.
Switching between filter settings reduces the efficient utilization of. The meaning of the concept working memory wm depends on the theory in which the concept figures. The role of working memory in visual selective attention. Attentional capture by working memory contents yi pan hangzhou normal university there has been controversy on whether working memory wm contents automatically guide attention. The relationship between attention and working memory. The influence of working memory on attention has been noted in several studies using dual task designs.
We summarize a series of experiments on visual working memory. Olivers1, judith peters2,3, roos houtkamp4 and pieter r. Guidance of visual attention from working memory contents depends on stimulus attributes. Vwm does not depend on sustained visual attention to the object johnson et al. The relationship between visual attention and visual working memory encoding. Beck the university of iowa efficient visual search requires that attention is guided strategically to relevant objects, and most theories. Stimulus presentation was controlled by eprime software version 1. Whereas tracking multiple targets across the visual filed depends on visual.
The videotoolbox software for visual psychophysics. Working memory and attention interact in a way that enables us to focus on relevant items and maintain current goals. Here we show a direct causal role for working memory. This is an acceptable finding to grasp because long term memory possesses the ability to direct attention to target items in the present and later on, and, away from distractors. Executive control of stimulusdriven and goaldirected. Neural processing of repeated search targets depends upon the stimuli.
Although there is no doubt that attention and working memory are closely related, this relationship may not be as ubiquitous as existing data suggest. Working memory is a system that provides an interface between the environment and various aspects of the mind. Interactions between working memory and visual perception. Memorybased attention capture when multiple items are. The relation between storage and processing of information in working memory is unclear but has been studied using individual differences. Although the capacity of visual working memory is limited, memoranda that are spaced. Dopaminergic modulation of visual attention and working. As one example, consider driving a car in an unfamiliar city. Electrophysiological correlates of the flexible allocation of visual. When people are asked to hold an item in wm for instance a color. Recently, vogel and colleagues used eventrelated brain potentials to show that these two things are related. We also included a parametric manipulation of the number of possible targets to further test the hypothesis that the cda could be used to directly measure the attentional templates in visual working memory. In the present study, we directly tested this proposal by measuring the contralateraldelay activity cda of human eventrelated potentials during visual search tasks in which the target is cued on each trial. Zhang b, lingyue kong c, sai huang d, zhenzhu yue e, suiping wang a.
The function of working memory whereby we strategically direct our attention is called. However, according to the theory of impaired topdown control in trait anxiety, visual working memory might be negatively correlated. Two important aspects of working memory are how many items it can. Working memory, the brain system for holding and manipulating a small amount of information temporarily, is essential for many cognitive activities. Wm has, conversely, been thought of as a means of maintaining representations to voluntarily guide. High visual working memory capacity in trait social anxiety.
Despite a vast body of research on visual attention and on working memory, the interaction between the two has seldom been addressed. Working memory is a cognitive system with a limited capacity that can hold information temporarily. Working memory capacity is one of the most important cognitive functions influencing individual traits, such as attentional control, fluid intelligence, and also psychopathological traits. The relationship between visual working memory and visual mental imagery is discussed in light of the current findings. We also investigated whether the effect of similarity on the attentional requirement for maintaining bindings and features is due to the stability of vwm representations by inserting a suffix during the maintenance phase of vwm in experiment 3. Attentional control, using working memory of distractor experience and strong biases, is a more effective posit than the dichotomic bias between goaldriven factors and physically salient factors. Theoretically, the type of attention involved could be specific to vision. The capacity limitation of working memory requires that only relevant. However, the new data suggest that memory maintenance might be attentiondemanding rather than automatic. Morey cc 2006 visual working memory depends on attentional filtering. The loss of information from visual working memory depends on retrocue reliability. Dopaminergic modulation of visual attention and working memory in the rodent prefrontal cortex. Working memory is more than a temporary storage of information short term memory because it also includes a manipulation as to allow people to perform complex activities such as reasoning, learning, and comprehension. The present study tried to replicate the effect of wmbased attentional capture using an adaption of downing.
Working memory wm and attention have been studied as separate cognitive constructs, although it has long been acknowledged that attention plays an important role in controlling the activation, maintenance, and manipulation of representations in wm. Visual working memory is the mechanism supporting the continued maintenance of information after sensory inputs are removed. Based on the high attentional resources and the wide visual attentional allocation in trait anxiety, visual working memory capacity might be positively correlated with trait social anxiety but not state anxiety. Visual working memory vwm is a limitedcapacity, short. Note that task set refers to the initial setting of perceptual filters to. Is the binding of visual features in working memory resourcedemanding. Recent studies have revealed a strong relationship between visual working memory and selective attention, such that attention is biased by what is currently on our mind.
Working memory capacity affects tradeoff between quality and. There has been controversy on whether working memory wm contents automatically guide attention. Visual working memory depends on attentional filtering nelson cowan 1 and candice c. Frontiers effects of working memory load on visual. Distractor filtering efficiency has been suggested to be an important factor in determining the visual working memory vwm capacity of individuals. This finding confirms the hypothesis that encoding strategies may influence visual working memory performance, and it is contrary to the hypothesis that the optimal strategy is to filter out any items beyond the storage capacity. There have been a few recent suggestions that working memory may play a role in the control of selective attention 1,2, but evidence for a specific role has been scarce. Multitasking increases the demands on working memory and reduces the amount of resources available for cognitive control. In the present study, we investigated whether training in visual filtering efficiency fe could improve vwm.
Morey 1 1 department of psychological sciences, university of missouri, 18 mcalester hall, columbia, missouri 65211, usa. Working memory also allows information to be combined from perception and longterm memory and shortterm memory. We propose that encoding strategy and, more specifically, attentional selection, underlie the correlation of some vwm tasks and iq, and not variations in vwm itself. Objectnumber sequencing is the wj iii cog auditory working memory test reborn with a more descriptive name and a better set of scoring rules. Effects of strategy on visual working memory capacity. Many investigators of visual working memory have assumed an automatic, modalityspecific memory faculty. Attention and working memory attention, memory and. Like further posits of attentional controls dependence on experience, learning to reject irrelevant stimuli depends on visual long term memory. However, other data show that not all memorized items influence the deployment of attention, thus calling for a distinction within working memory. Prominent new theories of attention consider visual working memory as attention directed to an internal representation chun, 2011. It is a type of memory that allows us to hold information in mind while we are working on it.
However, the new data suggest that memory maintenance may be attentiondemanding rather than automatic. Visual working memory capacity does not modulate the feature. Pdf interactions between visual working memory and. Working memory is often used synonymously with shortterm memory, but some theorists consider the two forms of memory distinct, assuming that working memory allows. Memory based attention capture when multiple items are maintained in visual working memory andrew hollingworth and valerie m. Recently, vogel and colleagues used eventrelated brain potentials to. Visual working memory depends on attentional filtering ncbi nih. The capacity to perform some complex tasks depends critically on the ability to retain taskrelevant information in an accessible state over time working memory and to selectively process information in the environment attention. Visual working memory is a brief, capacitylimited store of visual. Working memory holds information actively being used in cognitive performance. Filtering performance in visual working memory is improved by reducing early spatial attention to the distractors. The goal of experiment 1 was to determine whether humans store attentional templates in visual working memory during a visual search task similar to that of chelazzi and colleagues 1993, in which the search target is cued at the beginning of each trial fig.
University of groningen individual differences in working memory. The interval duration depended on the precue interval duration, for a total. Two important aspects of working memory are how many items it can hold, and how efficiently it can be used. Because this sorting requires simultaneous storage and processing of information, this test is a strong measure of the attentional control aspects of working memory. Shifting attention within memory representations involves. Two important aspects of working memory are how many items it can hold, and. Trends in cognitive sciences vol 10, issue 4, pages 9.
Is the binding of visual features in working memory. Working memory and attention a conceptual analysis and. Concrete mindset impairs filtering in visual working memory. We conclude that even in the absence of visual stimulation, early visual areas support shifting of attention within memorized representations, similar to when attention is shifted in the outside world. Morey department of psychological sciences, university of missouri, 18 mcalester hall, columbia, missouri, 65211, usa working memory holds information actively being used in cognitive performance. Individual differences in visual working memory capacity request. Data preprocessing and erp averaging were run with the brain vision analyzer software. Most theories of attention propose that we maintain attentional templates in visual working memory to control what information is selected. This evidence appears to suggest that unlike visual working memory related. Visual working memory depends on attentional filtering working memory, the brain system for holding and manipulating a small amount of information temporarily, is essential for many cognitive activities. Although the dichotomy of bottomup and topdown does not account for selection biases that are not goalrelated nor physically salient, it still provides a highly acceptable theory of attentional control. Attentional templates in visual working memory journal. Previous research suggests that anxiety is associated with impaired cognitive function, and studies have shown low verbal working memory capacity in individuals with high trait anxiety. Does maintaining bindings in visual working memory require more attention than maintaining features.
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