Whether The Effect Of Feature-based Retro-cue In Visual Working Memory Is Based On Spatial Attention

Visual working memory is a limited-capacity memory system that for temporarily storing visual information during information processing.Currently,lots of researchers investigated how we maintained and selected the information stored in visual working memory(WM)through retro-cue paradigm.During this paradigm,after to-beremembered visual stimuli's appearing,a “cue” appears to notify subjects which items in WM will be tested.The retro cue always leads to a superior memory in WM task,which named retro-cue benefit.Depending on how the cue works,retro-cue are categorized as spatial-based retrocue and feature-based retro-cue.Spatial-based retro-cue inform the to-be-tested item by showing location to-be-tested item,while the feature-based retro-cue use the feature that other than spatial information,such as color and orientation.Up to now,the mechanism of retro-cue benefit from these two kinds retro-cue is still in debate: Some researchers believe that it is spatial-based attention underlies the feature-based retrocue benefit,which means these kinds retro-cue share the same attention mechanism,while others give contradictory opinion that two independent systems respectively serve spatial-and feature-based retro-cue.Current research is designed to answer this question.In experiment 1,by manipulating the spatial information of the to-be-remembered items,we want to test whether feature-based retro-cue benefit still occurs when spatial information of the tobe-remembered items is removed to investigate whether the effect of feature-based retro-cue relies on spatial attention.The results suggests that no matter the to-beremembered items have or not have spatial information,the benefit of feature-based retro-cue is same;Later,in experiment 2,to eliminate possibility that the it is the temporal order of memory items in experiment 1 that caused the retro-cue benefit,we used rotation task to remove the spatial information of to-be-remembered items which appear simultaneously.The results were consistent with the results in Experiment 1: The spatial information of the item in WM does not influence feature-based retro-cue benefit.In experiment 3,we found that the feature-based retro-cue does not lead to spatial slope effect,a typical property of spatial attention,implicitly indicating that feature-based retro-cue does not recruit spatial attention.In experiment 4,we further found the feature-based retro-cue,like the spatial-based retro-cue,can protect items from interference.To sum up,current studies holds that feature-based retro-cue benefit does not account on the attention mechanism leading by spatial information;however,after selection,different kinds of retro-cue may share same mechanism to lead to the superior memory performance.