The Role Of Central Executive On The Information Recovery In Working Memory

Working memory(WM)briefly holds and manipulates information with the help of attention and plays an essential role in our high-level cognitive processes.Extensive studies have revealed that WM and perception may share one domain-specific attention(such as spatial attention,object attention)pool.Recently,Bai(2016)found that inserting a secondary-task which consumes the same kind of domain-specific resource as memory task does in the maintenance phase of WM resulted in performance impairment in the first place.However,after the completion of the secondary task,memory performance gradually improved with the passage of time.The previous study only observed information recovery in WM.However,the underlying mechanism for information recovery has not been explored so far.The present study aimed to explore this issue systematically.Since the information recovery process of WM primarily involves redirecting the attention released by the secondary task to the stored WM representations,according to Baddeley's WM model,the central executive may play a vital role in this process.For this reason,this study focused on the question whether information recovery in WM relies on the central executive.This study examined three different assumptions:(1)Information recovery takes place under the guidance of the central executive,(2)Information recovery takes place in a somewhat automatic manner,(3)Binding and single features recovery may have dissociated mechanism,only the former relies on the central executive.The present study used a multi-task paradigm.First,we inserted a competing secondary-task in the maintenance phase of WM to selectively impair memory performance and set the interval between secondary-task and test probe as 100 ms(short)or 900 ms(long).To investigate the role of the central executive,the domain-general attention was consumed by a backward counting task(high executive load)or an articulatory suppression(low executive load)task.Experiment 1 used color-shape or color-orientation conjunction as memory item with mental rotation task as the competing secondary task.Experiment 2 and 3 used simple spatial information as the memory item with visual search as the competing secondary task.The results found that:(1)When binding WM was impaired by a mental rotation task,memory performance did not recover with the passage of time under high executive load.(2)When spatial WM was impaired by a visual search task,memory performance can still recover with the passage of time under high executive load.The above results showed that binding and spatial information have different recovery mechanisms in WM and only binding recovery relies on the central executive.