A direct comparison of attentional orienting to spatial and temporal positions in visual working memory
DOI: 10.3758/s13423-021-01972-3
archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified
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Summary
This study investigates whether temporal position serves as an effective cue for attentional orienting in visual working memory (VWM), comparable to spatial location. While spatial attention is widely regarded as the most powerful selection mechanism in VWM, the role of temporal properties—specifically ordinal position in a sequence—remains less understood. The authors sought to determine if items can be retrospectively prioritized based on their timing after encoding and whether this temporal orienting operates independently of spatial mechanisms. The research employed three experiments using a color-change-detection task where four colored items were presented sequentially at different spatial locations. Participants received symbolic number cues indicating either the spatial location or the temporal serial position of the upcoming probe item. Experiment 1 compared predictive precues (presented before encoding) and retrocues (presented during maintenance) against neutral cues. Experiment 2 varied the delay between retrocues and probes to examine the time course of attentional orienting. Experiment 3 manipulated the retrieval context (spatiotemporal, purely spatial, or purely temporal) to test if temporal cues relied on spatial retrieval strategies. Results from Experiment 1 demonstrated that both spatial and temporal cues yielded significant benefits in accuracy and reaction times compared to neutral cues. Crucially, there was no significant difference between spatial and temporal cueing benefits, indicating that temporal position is as effective as spatial location for prioritizing memory representations. Precues were more effective than retrocues, but this effect was consistent across both dimensions. Experiment 2 revealed that the time course of attentional orienting was equivalent for spatial and temporal cues across varying delays, suggesting that temporal cues do not require a slower "spatial detour" to access memory. Experiment 3 further confirmed that temporal and spatial cueing benefits remained equivalent regardless of the retrieval context, providing strong evidence that items are directly bound to temporal positions rather than prioritized via spatial mechanisms. These findings challenge the assumption that spatial location is uniquely superior for guiding attention in VWM. The study establishes that spatial and temporal properties function similarly and can be used equally well to flexibly prioritize representations held in working memory. This highlights functional similarities between space and time in cognitive processing, suggesting that temporal position is a direct and robust feature for organizing and retrieving visual information.
Provenance
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| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | Crossref | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-17 |
| archive | success | canonical_url | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-25 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-25 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-18 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-18 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-18 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-17 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 1 | 2026-06-25 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 6 | 2026-06-18 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-25; verification: verified.
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