Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors, Dortmund, Germany.
Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors, Dortmund, Germany; Faculty of Psychology, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany.
Neuropsychologia. 2020 May;142:107442. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2020.107442. Epub 2020 Mar 20.
Retroactive cuing of information after encoding improves working memory performance. However, there is an ongoing debate on the contribution of target enhancement vs. distractor inhibition attentional sub-processes to this behavioral benefit. We investigated the electrophysiological correlates of retroactive attentional orienting by means of oscillatory EEG parameters. In order to disentangle excitatory and inhibitory attentional processes, the to-be-memorized information was presented in a way that posterior hemispheric asymmetries in oscillatory power could be unambiguously linked to lateral target vs. distractor processing. We found an increase of posterior alpha power (8-14 Hz) contralateral to the position of non-cued working memory content and a decrease of alpha power contralateral to cued positions. These effects were insensitive to the number of cued or non-cued items, supporting their relation to the spatial orienting of attention. Importantly, only the alpha power increase contralateral to non-cued positions differed reliably from the asymmetry in a neutral control condition, highlighting the importance of an inhibitory mechanism for the retroactive focusing of attention. Furthermore, the alpha power asymmetries relative to the positions of cued and non-cued items predicted the individual susceptibility to interference by irrelevant information during working memory retrieval. These findings indicate that the retroactive orienting of the focus of attention can bias the mental representations of non-spatial stimulus features stored in working memory and thereby promote a target-oriented retrieval process.
记忆后信息提示可提高工作记忆表现。然而，对于这种行为效益是源于目标增强还是分心抑制注意力子过程，目前仍存在争议。我们通过振荡 EEG 参数研究了回溯注意定向的电生理相关性。为了区分兴奋性和抑制性注意力过程，待记忆的信息以一种方式呈现，使得后半球振荡功率的不对称性可以明确地与目标相对于分心的处理联系起来。我们发现，在非提示工作记忆内容的位置对侧，后 alpha 功率增加，而在提示位置对侧 alpha 功率减少。这些效应不受提示或非提示项目数量的影响，支持它们与注意力的空间定向有关。重要的是，只有非提示位置对侧的 alpha 功率增加与中性对照条件中的不对称性有可靠差异，突出了抑制机制对于回溯注意力聚焦的重要性。此外，相对于提示和非提示项目位置的 alpha 功率不对称性预测了个体在工作记忆检索过程中对无关信息干扰的易感性。这些发现表明，注意力焦点的回溯定向可以偏向存储在工作记忆中的非空间刺激特征的心理表征，从而促进目标导向的检索过程。
