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

Content Provider	Europe PMC
Author	Heuer, Anna Rolfs, Martin
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 location of the upcoming probe item either before encoding (precues; Experiment 1) or during maintenance (retrocues; Experiments 1–3). Temporal and spatial cues were physically identical and only differed in their mapping onto either temporal or spatial positions. Predictive cues yielded cueing benefits (i.e., higher accuracy and shorter reaction times) as compared with neutral cues, with larger benefits for precues than for retrocues. Importantly, spatial and temporal cueing benefits did not differ. Equivalent retrocueing benefits were also observed across different cue-probe intervals and irrespective of whether spatial or temporal position was used as retrieval cue, indicating that items were directly bound to temporal position and not prioritized via a space-based mechanism. These findings show that spatial and temporal properties can be used equally well to flexibly prioritise representations held in VWM and they highlight the functional similarities of space and time in VWM.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13423-021-01972-3.
Related Links	https://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC8858307&blobtype=pdf
ISSN	10699384
Journal	Psychonomic Bulletin & Review [Psychon Bull Rev]
Volume Number	29
DOI	10.3758/s13423-021-01972-3
PubMed Central reference number	PMC8858307
Issue Number	1
PubMed reference number	34287765
e-ISSN	15315320
Language	English
Publisher	Springer US
Publisher Date	2021-07-21
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	Open
Rights License	Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. © The Author(s) 2021
Subject Keyword	visual working memory spatial attention temporal attention
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Experimental and Cognitive Psychology Arts and Humanities Developmental and Educational Psychology