Abstract
We developed a new experimental approach to compare how attentional orienting facilitates retrieval from working memory (WM) and long-term memory (LTM), and how selective attention within these two memory types impacts incoming sensory information processing. In three experiments with healthy young adults, retrospective attention cues prioritized an item represented in WM or LTM. Participants then retrieved a memory item or performed a perceptual task. The retrocue was informative for the retrieval task but not for the perceptual task. Attentional orienting benefited performance for both WM and LTM, with stronger effects for WM. Eye-tracking revealed significant gaze shifts and microsaccades correlated with attention in WM but not LTM. Visual discrimination of unrelated visual stimuli was consistently improved for items matching attended WM locations. Similar effects occurred at LTM locations but less consistently. The findings suggest potent and at least partly dissociable attention-orienting processes for different memory types.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
In addition to adding clarifications, explanations, and further analyses, we conducted a new online experiment to address the more substantial concerns. In the new experiment (Experiment 3), participants complete their long-term memory training on one day and perform the selective-attention task the following day, thus negating the possibility that the traces in our LTM condition may represent shorter-term priming effects. In addition, the perceptual discrimination task was modified to avoid the reliance on post-cueing of locations. The new experiment confirmed the core findings of the previous experiments in this new experimental setting.
