Abstract
According to previous studies of visual working memory, presence of an item that differs substantially from the remembered item in VWM can pop-out to trigger a shift of attention to the location of the visual change. What if detection of another change is necessary against the remembered items after that preceding change? In order to address this issue, we devised a change detection task in which two consecutive test arrays after a memory array were displayed in a way the change in the second test array can occur either at the same location as or at a different location from the changed item in the first test array. The results showed that detection of a change in the second test array went inaccurate only if the first test array had a change, and was impaired less if the change in the second test array occurred at the same location as the change in the first test array. These results indicate that detection of the preceding visual change can impair detection of a succeeding change, and the impairment would be larger if the subsequent change occurs at a different location from the preceding change. These suggest that a VWM-based pop-out change at one moment can suppress the pop-out of a change in the next moment, and the strength of the suppression relies on the spatial distance between the locations of the first and the second change.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2013