Department of Psychology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Rudower Chaussee 18, 12489, Berlin, Germany.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2022 Feb;29(1):182-190. doi: 10.3758/s13423-021-01972-3. Epub 2021 Jul 21.
Different visual attributes effectively guide attention to specific items in visual working memory (VWM), ensuring that particularly important memory contents are readily available. Predictable temporal structures contribute to this efficient use of VWM: items are prospectively prioritized when they are expected to be needed. Occasionally, however, visual events only gain relevance through their timing after they have passed. We investigated retrospective attentional orienting based on temporal position by directly comparing it with orienting to spatial locations, which is typically considered the most powerful selection mechanism. In a colour-change-detection task, in which items appeared sequentially at different locations, symbolic number cues validly indicated the temporal or spatial location of the upcoming probe item either before encoding (precues; Experiment 1) or during maintenance (retrocues; Experiments 1-3). Temporal and spatial cues were physically identical and only differed in their mapping onto either temporal or spatial positions. Predictive cues yielded cueing benefits (i.e., higher accuracy and shorter reaction times) as compared with neutral cues, with larger benefits for precues than for retrocues. Importantly, spatial and temporal cueing benefits did not differ. Equivalent retrocueing benefits were also observed across different cue-probe intervals and irrespective of whether spatial or temporal position was used as retrieval cue, indicating that items were directly bound to temporal position and not prioritized via a space-based mechanism. These findings show that spatial and temporal properties can be used equally well to flexibly prioritise representations held in VWM and they highlight the functional similarities of space and time in VWM.
不同的视觉属性可以有效地将注意力引导到视觉工作记忆（VWM）中的特定项目上，从而确保特别重要的记忆内容能够随时使用。可预测的时间结构有助于高效利用 VWM：当预期需要时，项目会被预先优先处理。然而，偶尔情况下，只有当视觉事件在过去之后，通过它们的时间才能获得相关性。我们通过直接将基于时间位置的回溯注意定向与通常被认为是最强大的选择机制的空间位置定向进行比较，来研究基于时间位置的回溯注意定向。在一个颜色变化检测任务中，项目按不同的位置顺序出现，符号数字提示在编码前（预提示；实验 1）或在维持过程中（回溯提示；实验 1-3）有效地指示即将出现的探测项目的时间或空间位置。时间和空间提示在物理上是相同的，只是在映射到时间或空间位置上有所不同。与中性提示相比，预测提示产生了提示效益（即更高的准确性和更短的反应时间），预提示的效益大于回溯提示。重要的是，空间和时间提示效益没有差异。在不同的提示-探测间隔内以及无论使用空间还是时间位置作为检索提示时，都观察到了等效的回溯提示效益，这表明项目直接与时间位置绑定，而不是通过基于空间的机制进行优先处理。这些发现表明，空间和时间属性可以同样灵活地优先处理 VWM 中持有的表示，并且突出了 VWM 中空间和时间的功能相似性。
