The visual familiarity effect on attentional working memory maintenance

Mem Cognit. 2024 Mar 19. doi: 10.3758/s13421-024-01548-1. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTAttentional refreshing has been described as an attention-based, domain-general maintenance mechanism in working memory. It is thought to operate via focusing executive attention on information held in working memory, protecting it from temporal decay and interference. Although attentional refreshing has attracted a lot of research, its functioning is still debated. At least one conception of refreshing supposes that it relies on semantic long-term memory representations to reconstruct working memory traces. Although investigations in the verbal domain found evidence against this hypothesis, a different pattern could emerge in visuospatial working memory in which absence of refreshing evidence has been observed for stimuli with minimal associated long-term knowledge. In a series of four experiments, the current study investigated the hypothesis of an involvement of semantic long-term representations in the functioning of attentional refreshing in the visuospatial domain. Both cognitive and memory load effects have been proposed as indexes of attentional refreshing. Therefore, we investigated the interaction between the effects of visual familiarity (a long-term memory effect) and cognitive load on recall performance (Experiments 1A and 1B), as well as the interaction between the effects of visual familiarity and memory load on the response times in a concurrent processing task (Experiments...

Source: Memory and Cognition - March 20, 2024 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Philippe Schneider Evie Vergauwe Val érie Camos Source Type: research