Abstract
Human beings always need to deal with discrete information in a flow. Working memory (WM) plays an essential role in integrating fragments into meaningful units. Recent studies have found that WM can realize the Gestalt cues within the stored representations and integrate them resulting in grouping benefits, while no study so far has addressed how the Gestalt integration can be maintained in WM. The present study examined whether retaining the integration in WM requires more attention than discrete representations. We hypothesized that the attention for retaining Gestalt integration in WM could be domain-specific, depending on the nature of integrated representation. To examine the hypothesis, we tested whether grouping benefits can be abolished by an attention disruption task. We employed closure cues (constructing a bar or a square) among the orientation disks in a sequence and inserted a secondary task during the maintenance phase to consume a specific type of attention. Experiment 1 revealed that the bar-closure grouping benefit was attenuated by a visual search task consuming spatial attention. To further dissociate the role of integrated and discrete representation in Experiment 2, we employed a square-closure cue, which used the same discrete representations (orientation), but created different integrated representations (orientation for the bar-closure cue; object for the square-closure cue). The results showed that the square-closure grouping benefit was immune to the visual search task, indicating the essential role of integrated representation. Moreover, the bar-closure grouping benefit was not impaired by a backward-counting task, ruling out the role of domain-general attention (Experiment 3). Based on the series of experiments, we suggest that retaining the Gestalt integration in WM requires more attention than discrete representations. Critically, the type of attention is contingent on the nature of the integrated representation, which is domain-specific.