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The influence of depth on object selection and manipulation in visual working memory within a 3D context

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Abstract

Recent studies have examined whether the internal selection mechanism functions similarly for perception and visual working memory (VWM). However, the process of how we access and manipulate object representations distributed in a 3D space remains unclear. In this study, we utilized a memory search task to investigate the effect of depth on object selection and manipulation within VWM. The memory display consisted of colored items half positioned at the near depth plane and the other half at the far plane. During memory maintenance, the participants were instructed to search for a target representation and update its color. The results showed that under object-based attention (Experiments 1, 3, and 5), the update time was faster for targets at the near plane than for those at the far plane. This effect was absent in VWM when deploying spatial attention (Experiment 2) and in visual search regardless of the type of attention deployed (Experiment 4). The differential effects of depth on spatial and object-based attention in VWM suggest that spatial attention primarily relied on 2D location information irrespective of depth, whereas object-based attention seemed to prioritize memory representations at the front plane before shifting to the back. Our findings shed light on the interaction between depth perception and the selection mechanisms within VWM in a 3D context, emphasizing the importance of ordinal, rather than metric, spatial information in guiding object-based attention in VWM.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32271100), and Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation of Guangdong Province (2021A1515010840) The authors have no competing financial interests that might be perceived to influence the results and/or discussion reported in this paper.

Open practices statement

Data from the experiments and program codes are available online (https://osf.io/z7b6j/). None of the experiments was preregistered.

Funding

Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation of Guangdong Province,2021A1515010840,National Natural Science Foundation of China,32271100

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  1. Department of Psychology, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, 510006, China

    Jiehui Qian, Bingxue Fu, Ziqi Gao & Bowen Tan

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  1. Jiehui Qian
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Correspondence to Jiehui Qian.

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Qian, J., Fu, B., Gao, Z. et al. The influence of depth on object selection and manipulation in visual working memory within a 3D context. Psychon Bull Rev (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-024-02492-6

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