Attention and Binding in Visual Working Memory: Two Forms of Attention and Two Kinds of Buffer Storage

Overview

Journal Atten Percept Psychophys

Publisher Springer

Specialties Psychiatry
Psychology

Date 2019 Aug 18

PMID 31420804

Citations 28

Authors

Graham J Hitch

Richard J Allen

Alan D Baddeley

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

We review our research on the episodic buffer in the multicomponent model of working memory (Baddeley, 2000), making explicit the influence of Anne Treisman's work on the way our research has developed. The crucial linking theme concerns binding, whereby the individual features of an episode are combined as integrated representations. We summarize a series of experiments on visual working memory that investigated the retention of feature bindings and individual features. The effects of cognitive load, perceptual distraction, prioritization, serial position, and their interactions form a coherent pattern. We interpret our findings as demonstrating contrasting roles of externally driven and internally driven attentional processes, as well as a distinction between visual buffer storage and the focus of attention. Our account has strong links with Treisman's concept of focused attention and aligns with a number of contemporary approaches to visual working memory.

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