Visual short-term memory (VSTM) enables us to actively maintain information in mind for a brief period of time after stimulus disappearance. According to recent studies, VSTM consists of three stages - iconic memory, fragile VSTM, and visual working memory - with increasingly stricter capacity limits and progressively longer lifetimes. Still, the resolution (or amount of visual detail) of each ...

A large body of work has shown that a perceived gaze shift produces a shift in a viewer's spatial attention in the direction of the seen gaze. A controversial issue surrounds the extent to which this gaze-cued orienting effect is stimulus-driven, or is under a degree of top-down control. In two experiments we show that the gaze-cued orienting effect is disrupted by a concurrent task that has be...

Recent studies suggest that visual features are stored in working memory (WM) via sensory recruitment or sustained stimulus-specific patterns of activity in cortical regions that encode memoranda. One important question concerns the spatial extent of sensory recruitment. One possibility is that sensory recruitment is restricted to neurons that are retinotopically mapped to the positions occupie...

Although working memory impairment has been well-documented among people with schizophrenia (PSZ), the underlying mechanism of this impairment remains unknown. The present study was conducted in a large sample of PSZ and healthy control subjects (HCS) to test the hypothesis that one putative mechanism-vulnerability to distraction from task-irrelevant stimuli-(1) can account for working memory i...

We evaluated the process of inferential revision during text comprehension in adults. Participants with high or low working memory read short texts, in which the introduction supported two plausible concepts (e.g., 'guitar/violin'), although one was more probable ('guitar'). There were three possible continuations: a neutral sentence, which did not refer back to either concept; a no-revise sent...

Running head: Age and individual differences in attentional control The effect of Age and Individual differences in attentional control: A sample case using the Hayling test. ABSTRACT Background and Aims: Individual differences in working memory (WM) have been shown to

Visual short term memory (STM) declines as people get older, but the nature of this deterioration is not well understood. We tested 139 healthy subjects (19-83 years) who were first required to identify a previously seen object and then report its location using a touchscreen. Results demonstrated an age-related decline in both object identification and localization. Deterioration in localizati...

Reports have conflicted about the possible special role of location in visual working memory (WM). One important question is: Do we maintain the locations of objects in WM even when they are irrelevant to the task at hand? Here we used a continuous response scale to study the types of reporting errors that participants make when objects are presented at the same or at different locations in spa...

CONTEXT Cognitive load theory aims to develop instructional design guidelines based on a model of human cognitive architecture. The architecture assumes a limited working memory and an unlimited long-term memory holding cognitive schemas; expertise exclusively comes from knowledge stored as schemas in long-term memory. Learning is described as the construction and automation of such schemas. Th...

This paper reports a meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies of attention shifting and executive processes in working memory. We analyzed peak activation coordinates from 31 fMRI and PET studies of five types of shifting using kernel-based methods [NeuroImage 19 (2003) 513]. Analyses collapsing across different types of shifting gave more consistent results overall than analysis within individual...