Retro-cue Characteristics and Visual Masking Differentially Influence Voluntary and Involuntary Attention

Abstract

This study examined whether voluntary and involuntary retrospective attention prioritize competing working memory (WM) representations involving low-level perceptual features and high-level semantic categories. In external attention, interactions between attentional voluntariness and representational level have been reported, with voluntary and involuntary attention differentially modulating high- and low-level content. In contrast, previous WM studies using either central or peripheral retro-cues found no such interaction. We therefore tested whether increasing retro-cue predictivity and using fully non-predictive cues would reveal this dissociation. We also investigated whether late visual masking promotes retrospective attention by protecting WM representations from visual interference. Across four experiments (n=140), retro-cue reliability (Experiments 1a–1b) and late visual masking (Experiments 2a–2b) were manipulated using peripheral and central retro-cues. Reaction times and accuracy were modeled using hierarchical drift-diffusion modeling. Voluntariness did not differentially modulate competing perceptual and semantic WM contents. Furthermore, four novel findings emerged: (1) voluntary attentional benefits on WM representational quality were enabled by increasing the reliability of central retro-cues and operated through protection from visual interference; (2) reducing retro-cue predictivity from low to non-predictive had little effect on involuntary attention elicited by peripheral retro-cues, whereas evidence for central retro-cues remained ambiguous; (3) eliminating late visual masking generally did not reduce voluntary attentional deployment; and (4) for peripheral retro-cues, masking selectively altered involuntary attentional benefits across representational quality and retrieval processes in opposite directions, while increasing the difference between voluntary and involuntary attentional deployment. Together, these findings indicate that retro-cue type, reliability, and visual masking differentially influence voluntary and involuntary selection in WM without altering their relative effects on competing perceptual and semantic representations.