scholarly journals Task relevance of object features modulates the content of visual working memory

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (9) ◽  
pp. 28-28
Author(s):  
J. A Droll ◽  
M. M Hayhoe ◽  
J. Triesch ◽  
B. T Sullivan
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (9) ◽  
pp. 2288
Author(s):  
Chen Wei ◽  
Duan ziyi ◽  
Li wenwen ◽  
Ding xiaowei

2011 ◽  
Vol 49 (6) ◽  
pp. 1622-1631 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul M. Bays ◽  
Emma Y. Wu ◽  
Masud Husain

2015 ◽  
Vol 78 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-106
Author(s):  
Justin M. Ericson ◽  
Melissa R. Beck ◽  
Amanda E. van Lamsweerde

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (12) ◽  
pp. 1069
Author(s):  
Andrea Bocincova ◽  
Amanda van Lamsweerde ◽  
Jeffrey Johnson

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (12) ◽  
pp. 535
Author(s):  
Kyeongyong Kang ◽  
Oakyoon Cha ◽  
Sang Chul Chong

2016 ◽  
Vol 115 (2) ◽  
pp. 1071-1076 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina M. Hanning ◽  
Donatas Jonikaitis ◽  
Heiner Deubel ◽  
Martin Szinte

Oculomotor selection, spatial task relevance, and visual working memory (WM) are described as three processes highly intertwined and sustained by similar cortical structures. However, because task-relevant locations always constitute potential saccade targets, no study so far has been able to distinguish between oculomotor selection and spatial task relevance. We designed an experiment that allowed us to dissociate in humans the contribution of task relevance, oculomotor selection, and oculomotor execution to the retention of feature representations in WM. We report that task relevance and oculomotor selection lead to dissociable effects on feature WM maintenance. In a first task, in which an object's location was encoded as a saccade target, its feature representations were successfully maintained in WM, whereas they declined at nonsaccade target locations. Likewise, we observed a similar WM benefit at the target of saccades that were prepared but never executed. In a second task, when an object's location was marked as task relevant but constituted a nonsaccade target (a location to avoid), feature representations maintained at that location did not benefit. Combined, our results demonstrate that oculomotor selection is consistently associated with WM, whereas task relevance is not. This provides evidence for an overlapping circuitry serving saccade target selection and feature-based WM that can be dissociated from processes encoding task-relevant locations.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rotem Avital-Cohen ◽  
Nurit Gronau

The mixed-category advantage in visual working memory refers to improved memory for an image in a display containing two different categories relative to a display containing only one category (Cohen et al., 2014). Jiang et al. (2016) found that this advantage characterizes mainly faces and suggested that face-only displays suffer from enhanced interference due to the unique configural nature of faces. Faces, however, possess social and emotional significance that may bias attention toward them in mixed-category displays at the expense of their counterpart category. Consequently, the counterpart category may suffer from little/no advantage, or even an inversed effect. Using a change-detection task, we showed that a category that demonstrated a mixed-category disadvantage when paired with faces, demonstrated a mixed-category advantage when paired with other non-facial categories. Furthermore, manipulating the likelihood of testing a specific category (i.e., changing its task-relevance) in mixed-category trials, altered its advantaged/disadvantaged status, suggesting that the effect may be mediated by attention. Finally, to control for perceptual exposure factors, a sequential presentation experimental version was conducted. Whereas faces showed a typical mixed-category advantage, this pattern was again modulated (yielding an advantage for a non-facial category) when inserting a task-relevance manipulation. Taken together, our findings support a central resource allocation account, according to which the asymmetric mixed-category effect likely stems from an attentional bias to one of the two categories. This attentional bias is not necessarily spatial in its nature, and it presumably affects processing stages subsequent to the initial perceptual encoding phase in working memory.


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