The effects of context on working memory and rhythms of attention

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b3199888

In everyday life, context affects how we interpret task-related information while performing a given task. In this thesis, I investigated the effects of context on two fundamental cognitive stages of information processing, working memory (WM) and attention. In Experiment 1, we explored the effects of task-irrelevant context changes on memory reactivation. We found that task-irrelevant context changes reactivate task-relevant target information in WM. In Experiment 2, we investigated the effects of the reliability of cues that signal target locations on the properties of rhythmic sampling of attention. Our preliminary results showed that if the cue was reliable, the sampling frequency was lower for locations where the target wasn’t expected. However, we observed that this trend reversed when we decreased the reliability of the cue. In the light of two studies’ findings, I suggest that contextual features can affect working memory even if they are task-irrelevant, and task-relevant contextual changes can affect attention due to task demands. Our results demonstrate that contextual features should be more emphasized in working memory and attention studies.