The Influence Of Shifted Internal Attention On Retro-cue Effect

The relationship between visual work memory and attention is very close.The retro-cue paradigm study reveals that the retention and extraction of visual work memory representation is closely related to the orientation of internal attention,that is,the retrospective cues can guide the internal attention resource to the task-related representation.The performance of the cued representation is better than the non-cued,called retro-cue benefit,but at the same time,under certain conditions,the internal attention of the resource-oriented to the cued representations will lead to a decrease in the performance of the representations without retro-cues,known as the retro cost,this benefit and cost collectively referred to as retro-cue effect.The type,quantity and reliability of the retrospective cues have different effects on this effect.As the retro-cues have changed the internal attention resource allocation that keeps the visual working memory representations,it is that the visual work memory representation appears hierarchical,that is,the cue-oriented representations are achieved from fragility to stability due to the refocusing of internal attention,so the priority level;and the non-cued representations due to the lack of this re-consolidation,the form of representation may be gradually weakened over time,in the subordinate level.However,in the literature that studies the retro-cue effect in the past,there is no explicit examination of whether the internal focus of attention switching between representations has an effect on the retro-cue effect.Therefore,this study manipulates the number of retro-cues presented during the retention period of visual working memory,and examines the effect of this factor on retro-cue effect.This study consists of three experiments:Experiment 1,presents one or more retro-cues to different memory representations within different retention intervals of visual work memory and found that the retro-cue effect intensity compared to the no cue condition has gradually disappeared.Experiment 2,in the same retention time interval,excluding that the disappeared retro-cue effect simply based on the time recession.Experiment 3,examined whether the internal attention can focus and keep two or more cued representations,the results found that the retro-cue effect accelerates the decline with the increase of the search representations.In this study,three experiments show that the strength of the retro-cue effect is not only affected by the natural time decay,but also limited by the switched times of internal attention focus.It also shows that when the internal attention focus maintains two or more focused representations,retro-cue effect will accelerate disappear.Based on the theoretical hypothesis of retro-cue effect and the theoretical model of visual working memory,we believe that when the internal attention switching between visual working memory representations,it can eliminate the retro-cue effect.It can be explained by refreshing hypothesis and time-based decay hypothesis,and the current study is in line with the prediction of slot-average model and constant resource model.