The influence of irrelevant mental representations on selective processing of visuo-spatial information in working memory

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Visuo-spatial working memory enables the active maintenance of relevant information for further cognitive operations and the association with incoming signals. However, the limited working memory capacity requires a mechanism that allows the adaptation of stored mental representations to current behavioral goals. Comparable to perceptual processing, this adaption process is associated with the focusing of attention on relevant mental representations. This can be studied by means of experimental designs including a retroactive cue (retro cue) that indicates which stimuli of a previous memory array are relevant for further processing. The focusing of attention on working memory contents was suggested to protect the respective mental representations from further decay and from interference by distracting signals. However, it is not yet resolved how this protective mechanism is activated at the expense of an increased decay of irrelevant mental representations. By means of a new experimental design and EEG correlates of visuo-spatial working memory, the proposed experiments focus on the fate of irrelevant mental representations following selective retro cues. This also entails studying the temporal decay of irrelevant mental representations and investigating the contribution of excitatory vs. inhibitory mechanisms to the adaptation of visuo-spatial working memory contents. A further experiment investigates to what extent distracting signals can interfere with the selective retention of mental representations and how such effects might be subject to available working memory resources.