December 2022
Volume 22, Issue 14
Open Access
Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting Abstract  |   December 2022
Attention without working memory: A feature-specific working memory gate for attended information
Author Affiliations & Notes
  • Hui Chen
    Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
  • Ping Zhu
    Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
  • Footnotes
    Acknowledgements  This work was supported by grants from National Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholars of Zhejiang Province, China (No. LR19C090002), National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 32171046) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2021FZZX001-06).
Journal of Vision December 2022, Vol.22, 4015. doi:https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.22.14.4015
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      Hui Chen, Ping Zhu; Attention without working memory: A feature-specific working memory gate for attended information. Journal of Vision 2022;22(14):4015. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.22.14.4015.

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      © ARVO (1962-2015); The Authors (2016-present)

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Abstract

Previous studies regarded attention as the “gatekeeper” of visual working memory (VWM), with attended information being selected into VWM while unattended information being filtered. However, in most previous studies the attended information was also the to-be-remembered one, where attention and memory requirement was intertwined with each other. Here, we argued attention and VWM could be dissociated when requiring participants to attend to and use certain information to perform a task while not requiring them to remember it. Such information was termed as key feature, and we directly test whether the key feature has ever been encoded into VWM in Experiments 1-3 through a variety of paradigms. We found that the key feature could not produce a working memory-driven attentional bias effect (Experiment 1), consumed no VWM capacity (Experiment 2), and produced no CDA component (Experiment 3), indicating that the key feature, despite being fully attended and used, was not encoded into VWM. These results suggested a highly selective VWM gate enabling selection even among attended information. In Experiments 4-7, we further explored how the VWM gate worked to achieve selection among attended information. Specifically, when the key feature was attended, we forced participants to open the VWM gate by asking them to simultaneously memorize another item. Interestingly, we found that a key color would enter VWM when the memorized item was also a color (Experiments 4 and 5), but not when it was a shape (Experiment 6). Experiment 7 found that a key shape would enter VWM when the memorized item was also a shape. These results suggested a feature-specific VWM gate for attended information. That is, we could selectively open the color gate for one attended item while close the shape gate for another attended item. However, once the color gate is open, all attended colors would enter VWM.

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