A direct comparison of attentional orienting to spatial and temporal positions in visual working memory.

ABSTRACT: Different visual attributes effectively guide attention to specific items in visual working memory (VWM), ensuring that particularly important memory contents are readily available. Predictable temporal structures contribute to this efficient use of VWM: items are prospectively prioritized when they are expected to be needed. Occasionally, however, visual events only gain relevance through their timing after they have passed. We investigated retrospective attentional orienting based on temporal position by directly comparing it with orienting to spatial locations, which is typically considered the most powerful selection mechanism. In a colour-change-detection task, in which items appeared sequentially at different locations, symbolic number cues validly indicated the temporal or spatial l

SUBMITTER: Heuer A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8858307 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature