Fig. 2: Behavioural results in experiment 1.
From: Focusing attention in working and long-term memory through dissociable mechanisms
a Task schematic of the testing trials in experiment 1. Participants first encoded two items into WM, with different colours and locations from those in LTM. After the first delay, neutral retrocues were uninformative, whereas informative retrocues (WM or LTM) indicated which location would be relevant in the memory retrieval task. After a second delay, the memory retrieval task and the perceptual discrimination task were equally likely to be presented. In the retrieval task, participants retrieved the location of a randomly chosen colour on neutral-retrocue trials and the location of the retrocued colour on informative-retrocue trials. In the perceptual task, participants discriminated the direction of one of the four arrows that briefly appeared at the four quadrants before being masked. The location of the probed arrow was indicated by a post-cue. b Memory retrieval mean RTs and accuracy for WM and LTM items, grouped by neutral-retrocue and informative-retrocue trials. c Perceptual discrimination accuracy at WM and LTM locations, grouped by retrocue neutral and matching trials. d Means and distributions of perceptual accuracy benefits for WM and LTM locations matching retrocues. Error bars in b–d represent ±1 SEM across participants (n = 30). In b, c, p values are reported according to two-way ANOVAs or post-hoc t tests with Bonferroni corrections.
