Schroth Lara Stella Marie, Fias Wim, Sahan Muhammet Ikbal
Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
Department of Psychology, Education and Child Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Sci Rep. 2025 Jan 13;15(1):1832. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-85015-6.
How are arbitrary sequences of verbal information retained and manipulated in working memory? Increasing evidence suggests that serial order in verbal WM is spatially coded and that spatial attention is involved in access and retrieval. Based on the idea that brain areas controlling spatial attention are also involved in oculomotor control, we used eye tracking to reveal how the spatial structure of serial order information is accessed in verbal working memory. In two experiments, participants memorized a sequence of auditory words in the correct order. While their eye movements were being measured, they named the memorized items in a self-determined order in Experiment 1 and in a cued order in Experiment 2. We tested the hypothesis that serial order in verbal working memory interacts with the spatial attention system whereby gaze patterns in visual space closely follow attentional shifts in the internal space of working memory. In both experiments, we found that the gaze shifts in visual space correlated with the spatial shifts of attention along the left-to-right one-dimensional mapping of serial order positions in verbal WM. These findings suggest that spatial attention is employed for dynamically searching through verbal WM and that eye movements reflect the spontaneous association of order and space even in the absence of visuospatial input.
言语信息的任意序列是如何在工作记忆中被保留和处理的？越来越多的证据表明，言语工作记忆中的序列顺序是通过空间编码的，并且空间注意力参与了信息的提取和检索。基于控制空间注意力的脑区也参与眼动控制这一观点，我们使用眼动追踪技术来揭示在言语工作记忆中序列顺序信息的空间结构是如何被提取的。在两个实验中，参与者按正确顺序记忆一系列听觉单词。在测量他们的眼动时，他们在实验1中以自定顺序说出记忆的项目，在实验2中以提示顺序说出。我们测试了这样一个假设，即言语工作记忆中的序列顺序与空间注意力系统相互作用，从而使视觉空间中的注视模式紧密跟随工作记忆内部空间中的注意力转移。在两个实验中，我们都发现视觉空间中的注视转移与沿着言语工作记忆中序列顺序位置的从左到右一维映射的注意力空间转移相关。这些发现表明，空间注意力被用于在言语工作记忆中进行动态搜索，并且即使在没有视觉空间输入的情况下，眼动也反映了顺序和空间的自发关联。
