Flexible Attentional Prioritization of Working Memory Object Representations

Working memory (WM) is an important cognitive function that, among other duties, allows temporary storage of visual representations of objects observed in the sensorium. The visual aspect of this core cognitive function enables our perception of the identity of objects and where those objects are located in space at any particular time to help direct attention. In a typical working memory task, a cue is presented beforehand to guide attention to which objects in an array to encode. The performance of our WM abilities can be improved on memory tasks by a retrospective cue resented after the encoding process of working memory. Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain etrospective cue benefits in WM performance, including the removal of irrelevant information from WM, attentional enhancement of the cued representation, protection of the cued representation from subsequent decay or interference, or retrieval head start.