Prospectively reinstated memory drives conscious access of matching visual input

Maintaining information in visual working memory (VWM) biases attentional selection of concurrent visual input, by favoring VWM-matching over VWM-mismatching visual input. Recently, it was shown that this bias disappears when the same item is memorized on consecutive occasions (as memoranda presumab...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2019-03, Vol.9 (1), p.4793-4793, Article 4793
Main Authors: Gayet, Surya, Moorselaar, Dirk van, Olivers, Christian N. L., Paffen, Chris L. E., Stigchel, Stefan Van der
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
631/378/1595/1636
631/378/2613/2616
631/477/2811
Bias
Color
Color Perception
Consciousness
Experiments
Female
Humanities and Social Sciences
Humans
Long term memory
Male
Memoranda
Memory
Memory, Short-Term
multidisciplinary
Reporting requirements
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Short term memory
Young Adult
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Maintaining information in visual working memory (VWM) biases attentional selection of concurrent visual input, by favoring VWM-matching over VWM-mismatching visual input. Recently, it was shown that this bias disappears when the same item is memorized on consecutive occasions (as memoranda presumably transit from VWM to long-term memory), but reemerges when observers anticipate to memorize a novel item on a subsequent trial. Here, we aimed to conceptually replicate and extend this intriguing finding, by investigating whether prospectively reinstated memory drives conscious access of memory-matching visual input. We measured the time it took for participants to detect interocularly suppressed target stimuli, which were either from the same color category as a concurrently memorized color or not. Our results showed that the advantage of memory-matching targets in overcoming suppression progresses non-monotonically across consecutive memorizations of the same color (‘repetitions’): the advantage for memory-matching visual input initially declined to asymptote, before being fully revived on the last repetition. This revival was not observed in a control experiment in which targets were not interocularly suppressed. The results suggest that, as observers anticipate to memorize a novel item imminently, VWM usage is prospectively reinstated, causing memory-matching visual input to gain accelerated access to consciousness again.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/s41598-019-41350-7