scholarly journals Prospective task knowledge improves working memory-guided behaviour

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frida Printzlau ◽  
Nicholas E. Myers ◽  
Paul S. Muhle-Karbe ◽  
Sanjay G Manohar ◽  
Mark G. Stokes
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Preliminary Evidence ◽  
Detection Task ◽  
Change Detection Task ◽  
Task Context ◽  
Task Knowledge ◽  
Task Oriented ◽  
Task Sets ◽  
Advance Knowledge

Working memory (WM) is the ability to keep information online for a forthcoming task. WM theories have tended to focus on how sensory information is maintained, and less on how WM content is used for guiding behaviour. Here we ask if WM is supported by a transformation of sensory memoranda into task-sets that are optimised for task-dependent responses. Thirty participants performed two different WM tasks; they remembered the tilt of oriented bars for either a rotation-discrimination task or a change-detection task. Task context was instructed either in advance (fixed task blocks) or at probe onset (mixed task blocks). If WM content is configured in a task-dependent format, performance should benefit from foreknowledge of the upcoming task. In line with this prediction, we found that WM accuracy was higher when participants had advance knowledge of the task context. Even if WM content can be configured as a task-set, perhaps only one item is optimised for guiding behaviour. If so, retro-cued prioritization may be supported by a transformation of the selected item from a sensory to a task-oriented code. We included a retro-cue on half of the trials to test the second hypothesis that task-foreknowledge enhances retro-cued prioritization. Interestingly, the benefits of task foreknowledge were independent of the benefits incurred by retro-cueing, indicating that attentional selection is sufficient for prioritization of WM content. Together, these results provide preliminary evidence that WM coding may be task-dependent, but neuroimaging studies are needed to elucidate the precise mechanisms by which task foreknowledge facilitates WM-guided behaviour.

Chunking by social relationship in working memory

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilenia Paparella ◽  
Liuba Papeo
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Change Detection ◽  
Secondary Task ◽  
Social Relationship ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Detection Task ◽  
Change Detection Task ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Meaningful Interaction ◽  
Probe Array

Working memory (WM) uses knowledge and relations to organize and store multiple individual items in a smaller set of structured units, or chunks. We investigated whether a crowd of individuals that exceeds the WM is retained and, therefore, recognized more accurately, if individuals are represented as interacting with one another –i.e., they form social chunks. Further, we asked what counts as a social chunk in WM: two individuals involved in a meaningful interaction or just spatially close and face-to-face. In three experiments with a delayed change-detection task, participants had to report whether a probe-array was the same of, or different from a sample-array featuring two or three dyads of bodies either face-to-face (facing array) or back-to-back (non-facing array). In Experiment 1, where facing dyads depicted coherent, meaningful interactions, participants were more accurate to detect changes in facing (vs. non-facing) arrays. A similar advantage was found in Experiment 2, even though facing dyads depicted no meaningful interaction. In Experiment 3, we introduced a secondary task (verbal shadowing) to increase WM load. This manipulation abolished the advantage of facing (vs. non-facing) arrays, only when facing dyads depicted no meaningful interactions. These results show that WM uses representation of interaction to chunk crowds in social groups. The mere facingness of bodies is sufficient on its own to evoke representation of interaction, thus defining a social chunk in WM; although the lack of semantic anchor makes chunking fainter and more susceptible to interference of a secondary task.

scholarly journals Impaired and Intact Aspects of Attentional Competition and Prioritization during Visual Working Memory Encoding in Schizophrenia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine V Barnes ◽  
Lara Roesler ◽  
Michael Schaum ◽  
Carmen Schiweck ◽  
Benjamin Peters ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Visual Working Memory ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Information Needs ◽  
Detection Task ◽  
Memory Encoding ◽  
Change Detection Task ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Irrelevant Distractors

Objective: People with schizophrenia (PSZ) are impaired in the attentional prioritization of non-salient but relevant stimuli over salient but irrelevant distractors during visual working memory (VWM) encoding. Conversely, the guidance of top-down attention by external predictive cues is intact. Yet, it is unknown whether this preserved ability can help PSZ overcome impaired attentional prioritization in the presence of salient distractors. Methods: We employed a visuospatial change-detection task using four Gabor Patches with differing orientations in 69 PSZ and 74 healthy controls (HCS). Two patches flickered to reflect saliency and either a predictive or a non-predictive cue was displayed resulting in four conditions. Results: Across all conditions, PSZ stored significantly less information in VWM than HCS (all p < 0.001). With a non-predictive cue, PSZ stored significantly more salient than non-salient information (t140 = 5.66, p < 0.001, dt = 0.5). With a predictive cue, PSZ stored significantly more non-salient information (t140 = 5.70, p < 0.001, dt = 0.5). Conclusion: Our findings support a bottom-up bias in schizophrenia with performance significantly better for visually salient information in the absence of a predictive cue. These results indicate that bottom-up attentional prioritization is disrupted in schizophrenia, but the top-down utilization of cues is intact. We conclude that additional top-down information significantly improves performance in PSZ when non-salient visual information needs to be encoded in working memory.

scholarly journals Characterization of decision commitment rule alterations during an auditory change detection task

2017 ◽  
Vol 118 (5) ◽  
pp. 2526-2536 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridgette Johnson ◽  
Rebeka Verma ◽  
Manying Sun ◽  
Timothy D. Hanks
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Change Detection ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Behavioral Flexibility ◽  
Detection Task ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
Stopping Rules ◽  
Change Detection Task ◽  
Decision Strategy ◽  
Auditory Change Detection

A critical component of decision making is determining when to commit to a choice. This involves stopping rules that specify the requirements for decision commitment. Flexibility of decision stopping rules provides an important means of control over decision-making processes. In many situations, these stopping rules establish a balance between premature decisions and late decisions. In this study we use a novel change detection paradigm to examine how subjects control this balance when invoking different decision stopping rules. The task design allows us to estimate the temporal weighting of sensory information for the decisions, and we find that different stopping rules did not result in systematic differences in that weighting. We also find bidirectional post-error alterations of decision strategy that depend on the type of error and effectively reduce the probability of making consecutive mistakes of the same type. This is a generalization to change detection tasks of the widespread observation of unidirectional post-error slowing in forced-choice tasks. On the basis of these results, we suggest change detection tasks as a promising paradigm to study the neural mechanisms that support flexible control of decision rules. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Flexible decision stopping rules confer control over decision processes. Using an auditory change detection task, we found that alterations of decision stopping rules did not result in systematic changes in the temporal weighting of sensory information. We also found that post-error alterations of decision stopping rules depended on the type of mistake subjects make. These results provide guidance for understanding the neural mechanisms that control decision stopping rules, one of the critical components of decision making and behavioral flexibility.

Temporal-Order-Based Attentional Priority Modulates Mnemonic Representations in Parietal and Frontal Cortices

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (7) ◽  
pp. 3182-3192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qing Yu ◽  
Won Mok Shim
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Temporal Order ◽  
Serial Order ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Detection Task ◽  
Change Detection Task ◽  
Early Visual Cortex ◽  
Recent Item ◽  
High Level ◽  
Trial Participants

Abstract The respective roles of occipital, parietal, and frontal cortices in visual working memory maintenance have long been under debate. Previous work on whether parietal and frontal regions convey mnemonic information has yielded mixed findings. One possibility for this variability is that the mnemonic representations in high-level frontoparietal regions are modulated by attentional priority, such as temporal order. To test this hypothesis, we examined whether the most recent item, which has a higher attentional priority in terms of temporal order, is preferentially encoded in frontoparietal regions. On each trial, participants viewed 2 gratings with different orientations in succession, and were cued to remember one of them. Using fMRI and an inverted encoding model, we reconstructed population-level, orientation representations in occipital (V1–V3), parietal (IPS), and frontal (FEF) areas during memory maintenance. Unlike early visual cortex where robust orientation representations were observed regardless of serial order, parietal, and frontal cortices showed stronger representations when participants remembered the second grating. A subsequent experiment using a change detection task on color rings excluded the possibilities of residual stimulus-driven signals or motor preparative signals for responses. These results suggest that mnemonic representations in parietal and frontal cortices are modulated by temporal-order-based attentional priority signals.

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