Role of visuospatial attention on encoding of information into working memory in young and older adults

Evidence has suggested that visuospatial attention and working memory (WM) are interdependent processes that influence each other and the form of that influence is not well understood. The effects of manipulating WM on visuospatial attention have been studied, but the effects of manipulating the encoding of information by varying the scale of visuospatial attention, have not been thoroughly examined. The goal of this dissertation was to determine if attention acts to maintain information already held in WM or if attention determines how information gets encoded into working memory. Three experiments were conducted to explore the interaction between visuospatial attention and visuospatial WM by using cues of different sizes to manipulate the scale of attention and to observe its impact on WM performance.;Overall, results showed that encoding of visuospatial attention in a demanding visual search task directly affected how information was held in WM, in a cue-size dependant manner. There were no significant differences observed between age groups in the pattern of distribution of visuospatial attention. Cue size and cue placement (precue versus postcue) within a trial affected the scale of attentional distribution and the subsequent WM performance. In younger and older adults, early and late selection affected the scale of visuospatial attention differently, with WM performance being directly related to scale of attention with precues (early selection) and the pattern being different and less predictable with postcues (late selection).