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Published online: 20 April 2016
© The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2016
Abstract The concept of attention has a prominent place in cognitive psychology. Attention can be directed not only to perceptual information, but also to information in working memory (WM). Evidence for an internal focus of attention has come from the retro-cue effect: Performance in tests of visual WM is improved when attention is guided to the test-relevant contents of WM ahead of testing them. The retro-cue paradigm has served as a test bed to empirically investigate the functions and limits of the focus of attention in WM. In this article, we review the growing body of (behavioral) studies on the retro-cue effect. We evaluate the degrees of experimental support for six hypotheses about what causes the retro-cue effect: (1) Attention protects representations from decay, (2) attention prioritizes the selected WM contents for comparison with a probe display, (3) attended representations are strengthened in WM, (4) not-attended representations are removed from WM, (5) a retro-cue to the retrieval target provides a head start for its retrieval before decision making, and (6) attention protects the selected representation from perceptual interference. The extant evidence provides support for the last four of these hypotheses.
Keywords Attention · Retro-cue · Working memory
An information-processing system faces two big challenges: the creation of processing priorities among relevant pieces of information, and the selection of relevant input amidst irrelevant ones. Attention is assumed to serve both of these functions for our cognitive system (Carrasco, 2011;Yantis,2008). Attention can be directed both to information coming through thesenses,andtoinformationgenerated or maintained internally in the absence of corresponding perceptual input (Chun, Golomb, & Turk-Browne, 2011). Notwithstanding the theoretical relevance of attention in both domains, attentional effects are far better understood in the perceptual domain (see the reviews by Carrasco, 2011;Egeth&Yantis,1997; Serences &Yantis,2006) than in the realm of internal information.
In the present review, we aim to bring to focus the research on how attention affects internal information, and in particular, information in working memory (WM). WM is the system enabling online maintenance of representations for ongoing cognition. Accordingly, performance in WM tasks is associated with several measures of complex cognition, such as reading comprehension, reasoning, intelligence, and educational outcomes (e.g., Bull, Espy, & Wiebe,...