Departamento de Psicología Experimental, Procesos Cognitivos y Logopedia, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.
Departamento de Psicología Biológica y de la Salud, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2023 Aug;30(4):1442-1451. doi: 10.3758/s13423-022-02238-2. Epub 2023 Jan 3.
There is broad consensus supporting the reciprocal influence of working memory (WM) and attention. Top-down mechanisms operate to cope with either environmental or internal demands. In that sense, it is possible to select an item within the contents of WM to endow it with prioritized access. Although evidence supports that maintaining an item in this privileged state does not rely on sustained visual attention, it is unknown whether selection within WM depends on perceptual attention. To answer this question, we recorded electrophysiological neural activity while participants performed a retro-cue task in which we inserted a detection task in the delay period after retro-cue presentation. Critically, the onset of to-be-detected near threshold stimuli was unpredictable, and thus, sustained perceptual spatial attention was needed to accomplish the detection task from the offset of the retro-cue. At a behavioral level, we found decreased visual detection when a WM representation was retro-cued. At a neural level, alpha oscillatory activity confirmed a spatial shift of attention to the retro-cued representation. We interpret the convergence of neural oscillations and behavioral data to point towards the theory that selection within WM could be accomplished through a perceptual attentional mechanism.
广泛的共识支持工作记忆（WM）和注意力的相互影响。自上而下的机制可以应对环境或内部需求。从这个意义上说，可以在 WM 的内容中选择一个项目来赋予其优先访问权。尽管有证据表明，在这种特权状态下保持一个项目不需要持续的视觉注意力，但尚不清楚 WM 中的选择是否依赖于知觉注意力。为了回答这个问题，我们在参与者执行回溯提示任务时记录了电生理神经活动，在回溯提示呈现后，我们在延迟期间插入了一个检测任务。关键的是，待检测的近阈值刺激的出现是不可预测的，因此，需要持续的知觉空间注意力才能从回溯提示的结束完成检测任务。在行为层面，我们发现当 WM 表示被回溯提示时，视觉检测减少了。在神经水平上，alpha 振荡活动证实了注意力向回溯提示表示的空间转移。我们将神经振荡和行为数据的融合解释为指向这样一种理论，即 WM 中的选择可以通过知觉注意机制来完成。
