Location-Specific Effects of Attention During Visual Short-Term Memory Maintenance

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance 2014-06, Vol.40 (3), p.1103-1116
• Main Authors: Matsukura, Michi, Cosman, Joshua D., Roper, Zachary J. J., Vatterott, Daniel B., Vecera, Shaun P.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Activity levels. Psychomotricity; Attention; Biological and medical sciences; Color Perception; Cues; Field Dependence-Independence; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Human; Humans; Information processing; Learning. Memory; Medical imaging; Memory; Memory, Short-Term; Neuropsychology; Orientation; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Perception; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Psychophysics; Reaction Time; Retention; Retention (Psychology); Sensory perception; Short Term Memory; Vigilance. Attention. Sleep; Vision; Visual Attention; Visual Memory
• ISSN: 0096-1523; 1939-1277
• DOI: 10.1037/a0035685

Recent neuroimaging studies suggest that early sensory areas such as area V1 are recruited to actively maintain a selected feature of the item held in visual short-term memory (VSTM). These findings raise the possibility that visual attention operates in similar manners across perceptual and memory representations to a certain extent, despite memory-level and perception-level selections are functionally dissociable. If VSTM operates by retaining "reasonable copies" of scenes constructed during sensory processing (Serences et al., 2009, p. 207, the sensory recruitment hypothesis), then it is possible that selective attention can be guided by both exogenous (peripheral) and endogenous (central) cues during VSTM maintenance. Yet, the results from the previous studies that examined this issue are inconsistent. In the present study, we investigated whether attention can be directed to a specific item's location represented in VSTM with the exogenous cue in a well-controlled setting. The results from the four experiments suggest that, as observed with the endogenous cue, the exogenous cue can efficiently guide selective attention during VSTM maintenance. The finding is not only consistent with the sensory recruitment hypothesis but also validates the legitimacy of the exogenous cue use in past and future studies.