Priority Selection Of Internal Attention For Working Memory Representations

The relationship between visual working memory and internal attention is very close.In the study of visual working memory,retro-cue can examine the effect of internal attention on memory representation.Generally,the retro-cue effect is used to reflect the performance of working memory.The retro-cue effect includes the benefit of retro-cue benefits and retro-cue costs.Exploring the retro-cue effect can well help us to explore the role of retro-cue in memory performance.Although retro-cue plays an important role in the maintenance of visual working memory,recent studies have shown that the validity of cue influences the retro-cue effect.The effect of different cue validity s on memory representation is still controversial.In this study,eye movement index reflecting internal gaze bias was used to reveal the changes of memory representation under different cue validity conditions,so as to explore the influence of internal attention on memory representation under different cue validity conditions.Freek et al.creatively used gaze bias indicators to verify that attentional selection and focusing of internal memory representations induced eye movement changes.In the first study,in order to explore the reliability of this indicator,we repeated Freek’s experiment.In this experiment,two color bars with different colors and directions were set,and the participants were asked to recall the direction of the color bars according to the detection item.The results show that even if the location of the item is not asked,the participants can still experience the shift of attention after detection,which is the result of internal attention’s selection of memory representation.It is also proved that the gaze bias index is stable and reliable in the experiments,which studying the representation of internal attention and memory.In the second study,we used eye movements to examine the change of memory state under different cue validity conditions.Participants were asked to complete four memory items change detection tasks under two different cue validity conditions.Experimental set up a neutral cue as control condition,we tested the behavior results by comparing the different valid under the different conditions of valid cue and neutral cue.The results found that high valid cue(100%)and low valid(30%)will have retro-cue benefits(RCB).It is worth to say that high valid under that condition will have a greater retro-cue benefits.By comparing the results of eye movement under different validity conditions,the gaze bias occurred only after the cue appeared in the high validity condition,while the gaze bias occurred after both the cue and detection in the low validity condition.In conclusion,combining with the results of studies 1 and 2,the following conclusions can be drawn in this study: first,gaze bias index raised by Freek which can reflect the relationship between internal attention selection and internal memory representation by eye tracking;Second,under high validity condition,only cued items were placed in the focus of attention,while other memory items were removed from the storage layer.However,in the case of low cue validity,the items to which the cue was directed and the items to which the cue was not cued were maintained in the memory representation at the same time,and the attention bias was induced by increasing the attention weight of the probing items(by placing the cue item into the focus of attention).Finally,weight bias of internal attention will cause eye movement,and the degree of weight bias of internal attention is related to the deflection of eye movement.Specifically,high cue-validity condition have higher weight of attention than low cue-validity condition,and the amplitude of attention bias is larger.