Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2023-04-07
Abstract： Attentional refreshing refers to the process that promoting and prolonging the activation of information in working memory (WM) by putting it back into the focus of attention. It can prevent the information in WM from fading over time or being interfered with by distractors. Previous studies on attentional refreshing have found that people can not only refresh the specified information in WM under the guidance of the retro-cues, but also refresh their attention under the influence of experience (e.g., reward-related or self-related stimuli). Recently, studies on the value effect in WM have found that people are able to prioritize more valuable information in WM. This result indicates that value may guide people’s attentional refreshing during retention. In the latest study, Atkinson et al. (2022), for the first time, confirmed that attentional refreshing could partly explain the value effect in WM. However, this study could not clarify why high-value information was prioritized to refresh. It has been suggested that the value effect in WM might be due to a biased attentional refreshing procedure. People may ‘think of’ the more valuable item more frequently or for longer periods of time during retention, relative to the other items. Therefore, this study conducted three experiments to replicate the value-directed attentional refreshing in a direct way and explored its mechanism. Based on previous studies, we calculated the sample size using the G*power. The number of participants in each experiment was 24, 23, and 24. All the experiments adopted a with-subject design. The independent variable is the item’s value, including high and low levels. Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 combined the value-directed memory paradigm and the dot probe task to test whether high-value information could be refreshed in priority as opposed to low-value information. In the beginning, participants should memorize 6 consonants simultaneously or sequentially. Each corresponds to a number to indicate its value, e.g., 1 or 9. In the stage of memory retention, a dot probe task was inserted so that the probe stimuli randomly appeared in the corresponding positions of high- or low-value items. Participants should judge whether the two dots presented were arranged vertically or horizontally. Finally, participants were free to recall the consonants they remembered before. Experiment 3 combined the value-directed memory paradigm and the blank screen paradigm and used the Eeylink to further explore the mechanism of value-directed attentional refreshing. Participants should memorize 4 regular grey graphs simultaneously. Each corresponds to a number to indicate its value. Then a blank screen was presented, and participants’ eye movements were recorded. At last, one of the graphs was probed to test their memory. Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 showed that whether items were presented simultaneously or sequentially, participants’ recall performance on high-value items was higher than on low-value items. The reaction time of the dot probe task at the corresponding location of high-value items was significantly faster than that at the corresponding location of low-value items. Experiment 3 also showed that memory performance on high-value items was higher than on low-value items. In addition, it showed that the number of fixations was higher at the corresponding location of high-value items than at low-value items during the blank screen. However, fixation duration had no significant difference between the high-value and low-value items. The above experiments directly confirmed the value-directed attentional refreshing that compared with low-value information, high-value information obtained the priority of attentional refreshing in WM retention. More importantly, the results indicated that value-directed attentional refreshing might be achieved by increasing the refresh rate of high-value information but not by deploying more time on high-value information. This study enriches and expands the research of attentional refreshing and provides new evidence for how people prioritize information in daily life. In addition, this study reveals the mechanism of value-directed attentional refreshing and develops the time-based resource-sharing model to some extent. It can help researchers develop corresponding computational models to simulate people’s attentional refreshing process.
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2021-05-31
Abstract： Attentional refreshing, which is independent of rehearsal, is one kind of working memory maintenance mechanisms. It boosts, prolongs, and strengthens the activation of information in working memory by retrieving these information into the focus of attention. Attentional refreshing helps people maintain memory when rehearsal is limited. The common strategy of attentional refreshing is give priority to refresh weakly activated items, but sometimes experience related stimuli also get the priority to refresh. To further explore the mechanism and internal processing of attentional refreshing, future research could focus on whether attentional refreshing can affect the accuracy of memory, how interference or processing tasks impact refreshing speed, and whether prioritizing to refresh weakly activated items is still a reasonable strategy under the high attentional load condition.
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