Visual Working Memory and Attentional Object Selection

Selective attention and the maintenance of perceptual objects in working memory are closely linked, but the nature of these links is not yet fully understood. This review discusses the role of selective attention in working memory maintenance and the role of working memory in the control of selective attention. It is argued that the involvement of spatial attention in memory maintenance is responsible for the fact that working memory representations are strongly position-dependent. On the other hand, working memory representations that control the allocation of spatial attention in visual search should be spatially global. The object maintenance and attentional control functions of working memory may therefore be based on qualitatively different types of representations. Attentional and working memory aspects of task-dependent selective processing are closely interlinked, and there are no clear functional or temporal boundaries between these two domains.

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