Guo Lijing, Nie Dan, Liu Penglan, Zhang Lingcong, Ye Chaoxiong
School of Education, Anyang Normal University, Anyang, China.
Department of Psychology, University of Jyvaskyla, Jyvaskyla, Finland.
Mem Cognit. 2025 Sep 17. doi: 10.3758/s13421-025-01789-8.
Retro-cues can enhance performance in visual working memory (VWM) tasks by directing internal attention to relevant items. While spatial retro-cues have been extensively studied, less is known about how different types of feature retro-cues (e.g., color, orientation) compare in effectiveness and temporal dynamics. Across four experiments, we directly contrasted spatial, color, and orientation retro-cues in dual-feature memory tasks and systematically varied cue-probe delays (50-650 ms) to track the time course of retro-cue benefits (RCBs). Results revealed a processing speed hierarchy: color retro-cues elicited larger benefit than spatial retro-cue at the shortest delays (50 ms), followed by spatial retro-cues (200 ms), whereas orientation retro-cues required longer delays (500 ms or more). Notably, color retro-cues produced stronger or more rapid RCBs than spatial cues, suggesting they engage attentional mechanisms more efficiently. In contrast, orientation retro-cues were ineffective unless participants were explicitly required to encode both features. These findings indicate that different retro-cue types differ not only in efficacy but also in how quickly they can modulate memory performance, reflecting feature-specific constraints in attentional selection and cue encoding. Our results challenge the assumption that all feature cues operate uniformly and highlight the importance of considering cue type, task goals, and retrieval context in models of selective attention within working memory.
回溯线索可以通过将内部注意力引导至相关项目来提高视觉工作记忆（VWM）任务中的表现。虽然空间回溯线索已得到广泛研究，但对于不同类型的特征回溯线索（如颜色、方向）在有效性和时间动态方面的比较了解较少。在四项实验中，我们在双特征记忆任务中直接对比了空间、颜色和方向回溯线索，并系统地改变线索 - 探测延迟（50 - 650毫秒）以追踪回溯线索益处（RCB）的时间进程。结果揭示了一个处理速度层次结构：在最短延迟（50毫秒）时，颜色回溯线索比空间回溯线索产生更大的益处，其次是空间回溯线索（200毫秒），而方向回溯线索需要更长的延迟（500毫秒或更长）。值得注意的是，颜色回溯线索比空间线索产生更强或更快的RCB，表明它们能更有效地运用注意力机制。相比之下，方向回溯线索无效，除非明确要求参与者对两个特征进行编码。这些发现表明，不同类型的回溯线索不仅在功效上存在差异，而且在调节记忆表现的速度上也有所不同，这反映了注意力选择和线索编码中特定于特征的限制。我们的结果挑战了所有特征线索以统一方式运作的假设，并突出了在工作记忆中的选择性注意模型中考虑线索类型、任务目标和检索背景的重要性。
