The effects of interference on selective attention and visual working memory across development

Abstract

Visual working memory (VWM) is a critical cognitive process required when completing mental tasks. Evidence showed that VWM is limited in its capacity but can be facilitated when introducing spatial attention cues. Past findings showed that both adults and children enhance their VWM performance when engaging with spatial attention cues, albeit children to a lesser extent. Therefore, differences in VWM performance are thought to be explained by variations in the mechanism of selective attention during information maintenance between adults and children (Shimi et al., 2014). Additionally, previous research has shown developmental differences in transferring information from iconic memory to VWM and that adults are more competent in employing attentional mechanisms to reactivate, refresh and consolidate more robust VWM representations compared to young children (Shimi & Scerif, 2017). Nevertheless, it is not well understood what happens to mental representations that have been consolidated in VWM. Therefore, the proposed study aimed to investigate if stimulating interference during maintenance adversely influenced already formed VWM representations and if so, whether it influenced the magnitude of attentional biases differently for children and adults. To examine this, 7-year-olds, 10-year-olds and young adults (total N=92) completed an interfering dual task during VWM maintenance that also included retro-cue and neutral-cue trials. Findings showed that adults had higher accuracy (d-prime) scores and faster reaction times (RTs) compared to 7-year-olds and 10-year-olds who in turn achieved higher d-prime scores and faster RTs compared to 7-year-olds. All age groups benefitted from informative attentional retro-cues on all interference conditions, signifying that for all age groups orienting selective attention retrospectively protects VWM representations from interfering effects that are generated by the concurrent processing of a secondary task. However, adults had larger retro-cue benefits than older and younger children and older children had larger retro-cue benefits than younger children, demonstrating developmental differences in benefits from attentional cues during maintenance. In addition, results showed better VWM performance in conditions where no secondary interfering task was presented during the maintenance phase for all, indicating that the presence of an interfering dual task during the maintenance period adversely influenced consolidated VWM representations for all age groups. Finally, 7-year-olds demonstrated faster RTs on conditions where the interfering dual task was presented compared to conditions where no dual task was presented. This finding was explained by the speed-accuracy trade-off phenomenon since due to increased interference effects their responses were faster albeit less accurate. Overall, findings from the current thesis elucidate further the relation between retrospective attentional orienting and VWM across development