Makovski Tal, Pertzov Yoni
a Department of Psychology , The College of Management Academic Studies , Rishon LeZion , Israel.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2015;68(9):1735-43. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2015.1049623. Epub 2015 Jun 11.
Visual working memory (VWM) and attention have a number of features in common, but despite extensive research it is still unclear how the two interact. Can focused attention improve VWM precision? Can it protect VWM from interference? Here we used a partial-report, continuous-response orientation memory task to examine how attention and interference affect different aspects of VWM and how they interact with one another. Both attention and interference were orthogonally manipulated during the retention interval. Attention was manipulated by presenting informative retro-cues, whereas interference was manipulated by introducing a secondary interfering task. Mixture-model analyses revealed that retro-cues, compared to uninformative cues, improved all aspects of performance: Attention increased recall precision and decreased guessing rate and swap-errors (reporting a wrong item in memory). Similarly, performing a secondary task impaired all aspects of the VWM task. In particular, an interaction between retro-cue and secondary task interference was found primarily for swap-errors. Together these results suggest that both the quantity and quality of VWM representations are sensitive to attention cueing and interference modulations, and they highlight the role of attention in protecting the feature-location associations needed to access the correct items in memory.
视觉工作记忆（VWM）和注意力有许多共同特征，但尽管进行了广泛研究，两者如何相互作用仍不清楚。集中注意力能否提高VWM的精度？它能否保护VWM免受干扰？在这里，我们使用了一种部分报告、连续反应定向记忆任务，以研究注意力和干扰如何影响VWM的不同方面以及它们如何相互作用。在保持间隔期间，注意力和干扰都被正交操纵。通过呈现信息性的回溯线索来操纵注意力，而通过引入次要干扰任务来操纵干扰。混合模型分析表明，与无信息线索相比，回溯线索提高了所有方面的表现：注意力提高了回忆精度，降低了猜测率和交换错误（在记忆中报告错误的项目）。同样，执行次要任务会损害VWM任务的所有方面。特别是，主要在交换错误方面发现了回溯线索和次要任务干扰之间的相互作用。这些结果共同表明，VWM表征的数量和质量对注意力提示和干扰调制都很敏感，并且它们突出了注意力在保护访问记忆中正确项目所需的特征-位置关联方面的作用。
