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. 2013 Jul 1;24(7):1104-12.
doi: 10.1177/0956797612466414. Epub 2013 May 7.

Foraging for thought: an inhibition-of-return-like effect resulting from directing attention within working memory

Affiliations

Foraging for thought: an inhibition-of-return-like effect resulting from directing attention within working memory

Matthew R Johnson et al. Psychol Sci. .

Abstract

Perceptual processing of a target stimulus may be inhibited if its location has just been cued, a phenomenon of spatial attention known as inhibition of return (IOR). In the research reported here, we demonstrated a striking effect, wherein items that have just been the focus of reflective attention (internal attention to an active representation) also are inhibited. Participants saw two items, followed by a cue to think back to (i.e., refresh, or direct reflective attention toward) one item, and then had to identify either the refreshed item, the unrefreshed item, or a novel item. Responses were significantly slower for refreshed items than for unrefreshed items, although refreshed items were better remembered on a later memory test. Control experiments in which we replaced the refresh event with a second presentation of one of the words did not show similar effects. These results suggest that reflective attention can produce an inhibition effect for attended items that may be analogous to IOR effects in perceptual attention.

Keywords: attention; memory; refreshing; short-term memory.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Task diagrams
A: Design for Experiment 1. Participants first saw two words, followed by an arrow cue instructing them to think back to (refresh) one of the just-presented words and speak it aloud. After that, a probe word was presented, and participants were instructed to speak it aloud as quickly and accurately as possible. Probes could either be a representation of the refreshed word (refreshed probe) or the unrefreshed word (unrefreshed probe), or a previously unseen novel word (novel probe). The design of Experiment 2 was similar, except that instead of an arrow cue, the word itself was presented onscreen for participants to read aloud. B: Design for Experiment 3. Participants first saw two pictures, followed by an arrow cue instructing them to briefly visualize (refresh) one of the just-presented pictures. A series of scrambled noise images then gradually faded away to reveal either the refreshed item (refreshed probe), the unrefreshed item (unrefreshed probe), or a previously unseen novel item (novel probe). Participants were instructed to press a “stop” button as soon as they detected the probe picture underneath the noise.
Figure 2
Figure 2. Results from Experiments 1 and 2
A: Response times for Experiment 1a (Yale) and 1b (OSU). Participants were slower to respond to refreshed probes (1a: 511ms, 1b: 463ms) than unrefreshed probes (1a: 488ms, 1b: 438ms; an IOR-like effect) and slowest to respond to novel probes (1a: 567ms, 1b: 513ms). B: Memory test results for Experiment 1a. Participants indicated higher confidence in remembering all old items versus foils. Probed items (indicated with circled letter ‘P’) were remembered better than non-probed items, but most importantly, refreshed items (leftmost group of bars) were remembered better than unrefreshed items (second group of bars from left). C: Response times for Experiment 2a (Yale) and 2b (OSU). Participants were faster to respond to both repeated (2a: 436ms, 2b: 426ms) and unrepeated probes (2a: 427ms, 2b: 424ms) than novel probes (2a: 505ms, 2b: 502ms), but did not differ in their response times to repeated versus unrepeated probes. D: Memory test results for Experiment 2a. Despite the lack of a response time difference between repeated and unrepeated probes in Experiment 2, the memory test showed the same pattern of results as in Experiment 1a, in particular better memory for repeated (leftmost group of bars) than unrepeated items (second group of bars from left). Error bars in all panels were generated using Morey’s (2008) correction to Cousineau’s (2005) method for creating intuition-fitting error bars for within-subjects comparisons.
Figure 3
Figure 3. Results from Experiments 3 and 4
A: Response times for Experiment 3a (Yale) and 3b (OSU). As in Experiment 1, participants were slower to respond to refreshed items (3a: 1069ms, 3b: 1033ms) than unrefreshed items (3a: 1053ms, 3b: 1026ms). However, in this experiment, participants were fastest (rather than slowest) to respond to novel probes (3a: 1046ms, 3b: 1022ms), likely due to changes in the probe response between Experiments 1 and 3 (see main text). B: Response times for Experiment 4. In this experiment, participants were actually faster to respond to repeated probes (1006ms) than unrepeated probes (1020ms). Responses to novel probes (1005ms) were also faster than those to unrepeated probes, but did not differ from repeated probes. Error bars in all panels were generated using Morey’s (2008) correction to Cousineau’s (2005) method for creating intuition-fitting error bars for within-subjects comparisons.

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