Gong Dongyu, Draschkow Dejan, Nobre Anna C
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity, Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Nat Commun. 2025 May 3;16(1):4126. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-59359-0.
We developed an experimental approach to compare how attentional orienting facilitates retrieval from spatial working memory (WM) and long-term memory (LTM), and how selective attention within these two memory types impacts incoming sensory information processing. In three experiments with healthy young adults, retrospective attention cues prioritize an item represented in WM or LTM. Participants then retrieve a memory item or perform a perceptual task. The retrocue is informative for the retrieval task but not for the perceptual task. We show that attentional orienting benefits performance for both WM and LTM, with stronger effects for WM. Eye-tracking reveals significant gaze shifts and microsaccades correlated with attention in WM, but no statistically significant gaze biases were found for LTM. Visual discrimination of unrelated visual stimuli is consistently improved for items matching attended WM locations. Similar effects occur at LTM locations but less consistently. The findings suggest at least partly dissociable attention-orienting processes for different memory types. Although our conclusions are necessarily constrained to the type of WM and LTM representations relevant to our task, they suggest that, under certain conditions, attentional prioritization in LTM can operate independently from WM. Future research should explore whether similar dissociations extend to non-spatial or more complex forms of LTM.
我们开发了一种实验方法，以比较注意力定向如何促进从空间工作记忆（WM）和长期记忆（LTM）中检索信息，以及这两种记忆类型中的选择性注意如何影响传入的感觉信息处理。在针对健康年轻成年人的三项实验中，回顾性注意线索对工作记忆或长期记忆中所表征的一个项目进行优先排序。然后，参与者检索一个记忆项目或执行一项感知任务。逆向线索对检索任务具有信息性，但对感知任务则不然。我们表明，注意力定向对工作记忆和长期记忆的表现均有益处，对工作记忆的影响更强。眼动追踪显示，与工作记忆中的注意力相关的显著注视转移和微扫视，但在长期记忆中未发现具有统计学意义的注视偏差。对于与被关注的工作记忆位置相匹配的项目，无关视觉刺激的视觉辨别能力持续得到改善。在长期记忆位置也会出现类似效果，但不太一致。这些发现表明，不同记忆类型的注意力定向过程至少部分是可分离的。尽管我们的结论必然局限于与我们任务相关的工作记忆和长期记忆表征类型，但它们表明，在某些条件下，长期记忆中的注意力优先化可以独立于工作记忆进行操作。未来的研究应探索类似的分离是否扩展到非空间或更复杂形式的长期记忆。
