Persistent effects of salience in visual working memory: Limits of cue-driven guidance.

Visual working memory (VWM) is a core cognitive system enabling us to select and briefly store relevant visual information. We recently observed that more salient items were recalled more precisely from VWM and demonstrated that these effects of salience resisted manipulations of reward, probability, and selection history. Here, we investigated whether and how salience interacts with shifts of attention induced by pre- and retrocueing.

Effects of spatial location on distractor interference.

When target and distractor stimuli are close together, they activate the same neurons and there is ambiguity as to what the neural activity represents. It has been suggested that the ambiguity is resolved by spatial competition between target and nontarget stimuli. A competitive advantage is conveyed by bottom-up biases (e.

Effects of salience are long-lived and stubborn.

Salience is a core determinant of attentional processing. Although information on salience has been shown to dissipate within a few hundred milliseconds, we recently observed massive effects of salience on the delayed recall from visual working memory more than 1,300 ms after stimulus onset. Here, we manipulated presentation duration of the memory display and found that effects of salience, albeit decreasing over time, were still markedly present after 3,000 ms (2,000 ms presentation; Experiment 1).

Unintended emotions in the laboratory: Emotions incidentally induced by a standard visual working memory task relate to task performance.

The ability to temporarily hold information in visual working memory (VWM) is among the most crucial and most extensively examined human cognitive functions. Here, we empirically confirm previous speculations (a) that a standard VWM task arouses emotions in participants and (b) that these task-induced emotions are related to VWM performance. In a first qualitative study ( = 19), by adapting a qualitative method of inquiry, the think-aloud technique, we found that the task induced different positive and negative emotions, such as joy and anger, which varied on the inter- as well as on the intraindividual level.

Massive Effects of Saliency on Information Processing in Visual Working Memory.

Limitations in the ability to temporarily represent information in visual working memory (VWM) are crucial for visual cognition. Whether VWM processing is dependent on an object's saliency (i.e.

The Impact of Handedness, Sex, and Cognitive Abilities on Left-Right Discrimination: A Behavioral Study.

The present study examined the relationship between left-right discrimination (LRD) performance and handedness, sex and cognitive abilities. In total, 31 men and 35 women - with a balanced ratio of left-and right-handers - completed the Bergen Left-Right Discrimination Test. We found an advantage of left-handers in both identifying left hands and in verifying "left" propositions.