The Influence Mechanism Of Space Distance On Retro-cue Cost

Working memory is closely related to attention,which can be encoded by external attention or represented by internal attention after the stimulus disappears for a period of time.In the research of visual working memory,the commonly used paradigm to study the influence of internal attention on cognitive processing of memory representation is the retrospective cue paradigm.In this paradigm,the memory performance of uncued items（invalid cue conditions）will be significantly reduced,a phenomenon called Retro-Cue Cost（RCC）.Previous studies have found that the spatial distance between uncued items and cued items will affect the RCC in invalid cued conditions,but there are still differences on the internal mechanism of the spatial distance affecting the RCC.This divergence may be due to the different spatial layout of stimuli adopted in these experiments and the different reliability of retro-cue.This study improved the shortcomings of previous studies,set a high reliability of retro-cue,and further explored the impact of this spatial distance on the loss by comparing the memory scores of different spatial distances,and proved that the impact of this spatial distance had nothing to do with extra stimulation.There are two experiments in this study: Experiment 1.The detection items are uncued items,and the adjacent conditions and interval conditions are set according to the spatial distance between uncued items and cued items.It was found that under the condition of invalid cues,there was a significant RCC,and the memory performance of adjacent conditions was significantly better than that of interval conditions（the longer the distance between uncued items and cued items,the worse the performance of subjects）.2.In order to explore whether the result of Experiment 1 is related to the extra stimulation in the interval condition,three experimental conditions are set up: 1.Condition 1,the adjacent close-range items have no extra stimulation;2.Conditions2,long-distance projects at intervals,with extra stimulation;3.Conditions,3 adjacent long-distance projects,without extra stimulation.The experimental results show that the RCC still exists when the load is 3,and the memory performance of condition 1 is significantly better than that of condition 2 and condition 3,but there is no difference between the behavior performance of condition 2 and condition 3,which indicates that the observed memory performance of non-cue items is only related to the spatial distance,but has nothing to do with whether there are other non-cue items among the items.Two experiments designed in this study prove that when the detection items are uncued items,the cost is related to the spatial distance between the uncued items and the cued items,but has nothing to do with whether there are other uncued items between them,and with the increase of the spatial distance between the uncued items and the cue items,the behavior performance of the subjects decreases significantly.Based on the theoretical model of visual working memory and the theoretical hypothesis of the generation mechanism of retro-cue,we think that the RCC increases with the increase of the spatial distance between non-cued items and cued items,which can be explained by attentional strengthening or refreshing theory and protectioninterference theory,and it is consistent with the hypothesis of slot average model and continuous resource model.