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Errors of attention adaptively warp spatial cognition

Nature Human Behaviour volume 9, pages 769–780 (2025)Cite this article

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A Publisher Correction to this article was published on 18 March 2025

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Abstract

Adaptation is the process by which we adjust internal models of the body, world and mind in response to sensory feedback. Although adaptation is studied extensively in the context of motor control, there is limited evidence that cognitive functions such as working memory are subject to the same error-driven adaptive control mechanism. To examine the possibility that internal spatial representations undergo adaptation, we had participants perform a task that interleaved a perceptual discrimination task and a spatial working memory task. Perceptual discrimination trials (85% of trials) presented an initial peripheral cue to exogenously capture attention, immediately followed by a displaced target stimulus. This sequence of events served to repeatedly induce a covert attentional allocation error. Interleaved spatial working memory trials (15% of trials) presented a stimulus at a pseudorandom peripheral location followed by a delay interval. On half of the working memory trials, the stimulus was surreptitiously presented at the same location as the initial attentional cue. We found that as attentional errors accumulated over the course of the experiment, participants’ spatial recall shifted to counteract the attentional error. The magnitude of this shift was proportional to the number of induced errors. Recall performance recovered rapidly following the offset of error trials. Multiple control experiments ruled out alternative explanations for these results, such as oculomotor confounds and attentional biases unrelated to error. These findings indicate that the computational mechanisms governing the adaptation of motor commands appear to similarly serve to adjust and calibrate spatial cognition.

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Fig. 1: Exogenous attention error and spatial working memory experimental paradigm.
Fig. 2: Time course and spatial specificity of spatial recall adaptation in response to spatial attention errors.
Fig. 3: Spatial cognition adaptation displays hallmark features of visuomotor adaptation.
Fig. 4: Attention without error cannot explain spatial cognition adaptation.
Fig. 5: Replication of working memory adaptation across the visual field and controlling for potential oculomotor confounds.

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Data availability

The data supporting the findings of this study are available at https://osf.io/egskw/.

Code availability

The analysis code supporting the findings of this study is available on GitHub at https://github.com/brissend/WM_adapt.

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Acknowledgements

We thank T. Adkins and Q. Nguyen for helpful comments and discussion. This work was supported by National Institutes of Health grant no. F32MH124268 (J.A.B.). The funder had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the paper.

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    James A. Brissenden, Yitong Yin & Taraz G. Lee

  2. School of Kinesiology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Michael Vesia

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J.A.B. and T.G.L. conceived the study. J.A.B. and Y.Y. collected the data. J.A.B. carried out data analysis and wrote the original draft of the paper. All authors reviewed the paper and provided critical revisions. T.G.L. and M.V. provided resources and supervision.

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Correspondence to James A. Brissenden or Taraz G. Lee.

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Brissenden, J.A., Yin, Y., Vesia, M. et al. Errors of attention adaptively warp spatial cognition. Nat Hum Behav 9, 769–780 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02109-5

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