Allen, RJ orcid.org/0000-0002-1887-3016 and Ueno, T (2018) Multiple high-reward items can be prioritized in working memory but with greater vulnerability to interference. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 80 (7). pp. 1731-1743. ISSN 1943-3921
Abstract
An emerging literature indicates that working memory and attention interact in determining what is retained over time, though the nature of this relationship and the impacts on performance across different task contexts remain to be mapped out. In the present study, four experiments examined whether participants can prioritize one or more ‘high reward’ items within a four-item target array for the purposes of an immediate cued recall task, and the extent to which this mediates the disruptive impact of a post-display to-be-ignored suffix. All four experiments indicated that endogenous direction of attention towards high-reward items results in their improved recall. Furthermore, increasing the number of high-reward items from 1 to 3 (Experiments 1-3) produces no decline in recall performance for those items, while associating each item in an array with a different reward value results in correspondingly graded levels of recall performance (Experiment 4). These results suggest the ability to exert precise voluntary control in the prioritization of multiple targets. However, in line with recent outcomes drawn from serial visual memory, this endogenously driven focus on high-reward items results in greater susceptibility to exogenous suffix interference, relative to low-reward items. This contrasts with outcomes from cueing paradigms, indicating that different methods of attentional direction may not always result in equivalent outcomes on working memory performance.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2018, Springer. This is an author produced version of a paper published in Attention, Perception & Psychophysics. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | attention; visual working memory; interference; reward; suffix |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Medicine and Health (Leeds) > School of Psychology (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 21 May 2018 11:01 |
Last Modified: | 02 Jul 2019 00:41 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer US |
Identification Number: | 10.3758/s13414-018-1543-6 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:131077 |