How Attentional Control Operates in Service of Working Memory Over the Course of Development

Abstract

Selective attention is prospective in the sense that it “prioritizes and selects” information likely useful for guiding future behavior and retrospective in the sense that it biases the contents of working memory after WM encoding to promote adaptive behavior (Mangun et al., 2020). Thus, selective attention can be directed to both external representations, items perceived visually, and internal representations, items maintained in working memory (Griffin & Nobre, 2003). Behavioral studies incorporating prospective and retrospective attentional orienting cues have shown that adults are capable of exerting attentional control on both external representations during encoding and internal representations during maintenance, and doing so improves WM task performance. Few studies have examined how the abilities to orient attention to internal representations versus external ones change over the course of development, and no studies have examined how the fate of unattended items changes over the course of development. Previously collected data was used to investigate the developmental trajectory of the abilities to orient attention to internal versus external representations in 7-year-olds, 11-year-olds, and adults. Aiming to gain a better sense of the mechanisms that underlie attentional orienting benefits in adults and develop task versions for testing in children, subsequent experiments investigated the impact of cue validity on the benefits provided by prospective and retrospective orienting cues and the impact of retrospective orienting on representations of unattended items in adults. The results of the first experiment suggest the ability to orient attention to internal representations during maintenance develops prior to the ability to orient attention to external representations during encoding, as 7-year-olds benefit from prospective but not retrospective orienting cues to the same extent as adults. The second array match experiment demonstrated that both attentional orienting abilities are partially dependent upon voluntary attentional control, as adults are capable of prioritizing representations of attended (cued) array items over unattended (uncued) array items. The third double-probe array match experiment suggests retrospective orienting may provide a net benefit to adult WM capacity, as prioritization of attended array items did not significantly worsen memory for unattended representations.