Flexible cognitive resources: Competitive content maps for attention and memory
TL;DR: This work claims that a variety of capacity-limited buffers related to attention, recognition, and memory have a two-dimensional 'map' architecture, where individual items compete for cortical real estate.
About: This article is published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences.The article was published on 2013-03-01 and is currently open access. It has received 271 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Cognitive load & Visual spatial attention.
Citations
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TL;DR: Behavioral and emerging neural evidence for the proposed conceptualization of working memory as a limited resource that is distributed flexibly among all items to be maintained in memory are considered.
Abstract: Working memory is widely considered to be limited in capacity, holding a fixed, small number of items, such as Miller's 'magical number' seven or Cowan's four. It has recently been proposed that working memory might better be conceptualized as a limited resource that is distributed flexibly among all items to be maintained in memory. According to this view, the quality rather than the quantity of working memory representations determines performance. Here we consider behavioral and emerging neural evidence for this proposal.
847 citations
TL;DR: For instance, this paper showed that visual working memory capacity is strongly correlated with overall cognitive ability, can be understood at the level of neural circuits, and is easily measured, and that capacity influences tasks ranging from saccade targeting to analogical reasoning.
807 citations
TL;DR: This work suggests that none of these hundreds of studies – either individually or collectively – provides compelling evidence for true top-down effects on perception, or “cognitive penetrability,” and suggests that these studies all fall prey to only a handful of pitfalls.
Abstract: What determines what we see? In contrast to the traditional "modular" understanding of perception, according to which visual processing is encapsulated from higher-level cognition, a tidal wave of recent research alleges that states such as beliefs, desires, emotions, motivations, intentions, and linguistic representations exert direct top-down influences on what we see. There is a growing consensus that such effects are ubiquitous, and that the distinction between perception and cognition may itself be unsustainable. We argue otherwise: none of these hundreds of studies - either individually or collectively - provide compelling evidence for true top-down effects on perception, or "cognitive penetrability". In particular, and despite their variety, we suggest that these studies all fall prey to only a handful of pitfalls. And whereas abstract theoretical challenges have failed to resolve this debate in the past, our presentation of these pitfalls is empirically anchored: in each case, we show not only how certain studies could be susceptible to the pitfall (in principle), but how several alleged top-down effects actually are explained by the pitfall (in practice). Moreover, these pitfalls are perfectly general, with each applying to dozens of other top-down effects. We conclude by extracting the lessons provided by these pitfalls into a checklist that future work could use to convincingly demonstrate top-down effects on visual perception. The discovery of substantive top-down effects of cognition on perception would revolutionize our understanding of how the mind is organized; but without addressing these pitfalls, no such empirical report will license such exciting conclusions. Language: en
707 citations
TL;DR: Recent translational and clinical research reveals the pivotal role that imagery plays in many mental disorders and suggests how clinicians can utilize imagery in treatment.
576 citations
Cites background from "Flexible cognitive resources: Compe..."
...Such relationships dovetail nicely with capacity limitation theories that propose an interaction between the content and anatomical restrictions due to the 2D layout of structures like V1, which support the representations [118]....
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TL;DR: It is proposed that the propensity to produce persistent activity is a general feature of cortical networks and may have to shift focus from asking where working memory can be observed in the brain to how a range of specialized brain areas together transform sensory information into a delayed behavioral response.
510 citations
Cites background from "Flexible cognitive resources: Compe..."
...While individual stores might already have capacity restrictions [46,155], we suggest that properties of the overall working memory network might contribute to limitations of capacity as well (see Box 4)....
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..., of visual space in V1) or in any other limited ‘cortical real estate’ [155], such that individual memorized items interfere with each other during the delay period or already during encoding [46]....
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References
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TL;DR: A new hypothesis about the role of focused attention is proposed, which offers a new set of criteria for distinguishing separable from integral features and a new rationale for predicting which tasks will show attention limits and which will not.
11,452 citations
TL;DR: The two basic phenomena that define the problem of visual attention can be illustrated in a simple example and selectivity-the ability to filter out un wanted information is illustrated.
Abstract: The two basic phenomena that define the problem of visual attention can be illustrated in a simple example. Consider the arrays shown in each panel of Figure 1. In a typical experiment, before the arrays were presented, subjects would be asked to report letters appearing in one color (targets, here black letters), and to disregard letters in the other color (nontargets, here white letters). The array would then be briefly flashed, and the subjects, without any opportunity for eye movements, would give their report. The display mimics our. usual cluttered visual environment: It contains one or more objects that are relevant to current behavior, along with others that are irrelevant. The first basic phenomenon is limited capacity for processing information. At any given time, only a small amount of the information available on the retina can be processed and used in the control of behavior. Subjectively, giving attention to any one target leaves less available for others. In Figure 1, the probability of reporting the target letter N is much lower with two accompa nying targets (Figure la) than with none (Figure Ib). The second basic phenomenon is selectivity-the ability to filter out un wanted information. Subjectively, one is aware of attended stimuli and largely unaware of unattended ones. Correspondingly, accuracy in identifying an attended stimulus may be independent of the number of nontargets in a display (Figure la vs Ie) (see Bundesen 1990, Duncan 1980).
7,642 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1958TL;DR: In this paper, the authors describe a transition between behaviourist learning theory and the modern information processing or cognitive approach to perception and communication skills, and provide a principal starting point for theoretical and experimental work on selective attention.
Abstract: First published in 1958, this book has become recognized as a classic in its field. It marked a transition between behaviourist learning theory and the modern 'information processing' or 'cognitive' approach to perception and communication skills. It continues to provide a principal starting point for theoretical and experimental work on selective attention. As Professor Posner writes in his Foreword to the reissue: 'it remains of great interest to view the work in its original form and to ponder those creative moments when the mind first grasps a new insight and then struggles to work out its consequences.
5,325 citations
TL;DR: It is demonstrated that it is possible to retain information about only four colours or orientations in visual working memory at one time, but it is also possible to retaining both the colour and the orientation of four objects, indicating that visual workingMemory stores integrated objects rather than individual features.
Abstract: Short-term memory storage can be divided into separate subsystems for verbal information and visual information, and recent studies have begun to delineate the neural substrates of these working-memory systems. Although the verbal storage system has been well characterized, the storage capacity of visual working memory has not yet been established for simple, suprathreshold features or for conjunctions of features. Here we demonstrate that it is possible to retain information about only four colours or orientations in visual working memory at one time. However, it is also possible to retain both the colour and the orientation of four objects, indicating that visual working memory stores integrated objects rather than individual features. Indeed, objects defined by a conjunction of four features can be retained in working memory just as well as single-feature objects, allowing sixteen individual features to be retained when distributed across four objects. Thus, the capacity of visual working memory must be understood in terms of integrated objects rather than individual features, which places significant constraints on cognitive and neurobiological models of the temporary storage of visual information.
3,608 citations
TL;DR: These results appear to provide an important model system for the study of the relationship between attention and the structure of the visual system, and it is found that attention shifts are not closely related to the saccadic eye movement system.
Abstract: Detection of a visual signal requires information to reach a system capable of eliciting arbitrary responses required by the experimenter. Detection latencies are reduced when subjects receive a cue that indicates where in the visual field the signal will occur. This shift in efficiency appears to be due to an alignment (orienting) of the central attentional system with the pathways to be activated by the visual input. It would also be possible to describe these results as being due to a reduced criterion at the expected target position. However, this description ignores important constraints about the way in which expectancy improves performance. First, when subjects are cued on each trial, they show stronger expectancy effects than when a probable position is held constant for a block, indicating the active nature of the expectancy. Second, while information on spatial position improves performance, information on the form of the stimulus does not. Third, expectancy may lead to improvements in latency without a reduction in accuracy. Fourth, there appears to be little ability to lower the criterion at two positions that are not spatially contiguous. A framework involving the employment of a limited-capacity attentional mechanism seems to capture these constraints better than the more general language of criterion setting. Using this framework, we find that attention shifts are not closely related to the saccadic eye movement system. For luminance detection the retina appears to be equipotential with respect to attention shifts, since costs to unexpected stimuli are similar whether foveal or peripheral. These results appear to provide an important model system for the study of the relationship between attention and the structure of the visual system.
3,559 citations