Directed Remembering And Directed Forgetting Retro-cue Benefit In Visual Working Memory

Visual working memory(VWM)is a subset of working memory(WM).The ability to maintain information temporarily in VWM is a fundamental limitation of the human cognitive system.A body of studies have shown that the performance on VWM tasks decreased steadily as the number of items maintained in the VWM increased.Thus,the ability to efficiently filter task-relevant items from a large set of VWM items is crucial to promote VWM performance.Some studies found that if a spatial cue was present for participants in the VWM task,the task performance would enhance.This is demonstrated by the so-called retro-cue benefit.Researchers focused their attention on the reason of retro-cue benefit enhanced VWM task performance.And they found that participants might maintain the task-relevant information but inhibit the task-irrelevant information when they follow an informative cue.However,the neural process in time-course of the retro-cue benefit was still unclear.Numerous researches demonstrated that the ability of maintain task-relevant and inhibit task-irrelevant information of participants with high-and low-VWM capacity were difference before information access VWM.However,whether these abilities were still difference while the maintenance of representations already held in VWM was unclear.Two sub-study were including in this study.Sub-study 1 consisted of 25 college students.With some modification,a directed forgetting paradigm of VWM was adopted in the sub-study 1.Based on the electroencephalographic(EEG)data,this sub-study compares the neural activity in time-course by Event-related potentials(ERPs).Three parts were including in the sub-study 2.In the experiment 2a,a change-detection paradigm was adopted for the memory array settings of the main task of the sub-study 2.30 participants took part in the experiment 2a.Before the main task was performed,participants must complete a change-detection task to separate the participants' capacity in two level,high-and low-VWM capacity,and this part called pre-main task.The main task(experiment 2b)was adopted a modified directed forgetting paradigm of VWM,and the number of memory items was followed by the results of the experiment 2b.EEG was also recorded in experiment 2a.24 participants joined in the pre-main task and experiment 2b.The results of sub-study 1 were as follows,1)compared with baseline condition,shorter reaction time(RT)was observed in both directed remembering(DR)and directed forgetting(DF)conditions;2)shorter RT was observed for DR than DF conditions;3)DR cues evoked more negative N1 than DF cues;4)DF cues evoked more positive P2 than DR cues;5)an enhanced P3 was evoked for DF cues than DR cues.The results of sub-study 2 were as follows,1)for the high-VWM capacity participants,the change-detection accuracy difference between baseline 6 condition and remember(R)2 forget(F)4 condition was not significant,and the difference between baseline 6 condition and F4R2 was not significant,too.However,for the low-VWM capacity participants,both change-detection accuracy of R2F4 and F4R2 conditions was higher than baseline 6 condition and the R2F4 condition was significantly higher than baseline 6;2)for the all cued condition,the change-detection accuracy for highand low-VWM capacity participants over all task type were not significant difference when they were compared in pairs,but the difference between baseline 6 over high-and low-VWM capacity participants was significant;3)high-VWM capacity participants followed with instability N2 pc but steady CDA,but for the low-VWM capacity participants,the reverse was the case;4)for the CDAp time window,cue elicited a steady CDAp only in VWM low-load condition(memory array items 4)for the high-VWM capacity participants,but for the low-VWM capacity participants,a steady CDAp was evoked by cue in both low-load and high-load(memory array items 6)conditions;5)in the P1/N1 time window,for the low-VWM capacity participants,the peak latency in the high-load condition between contralateral and ipsilateral was not significantly difference.Both DR and DF cue could enhance the VWM task performance,but the DR cue was more effortful than DF cue.Three sequential neural processes were including in time-course when cue was present for participants,which is discrimination process,selective attention process,and information dynamic maintenance process.And the retro-cue benefits were more helpful for low-VWM capacity participants.The information who was cued as task-irrelevant information did not participate in the test array.The maintenance of task-relevant information and the suppression of task-irrelevant information might share the same resources,but suppression might recruit additional resources than maintenance.The high-VWM capacity participants might have greater control over VWM resources.