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

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Investigating the internal selection mechanisms for perception and visual working memory (VWM).
• Understanding how object representations in 3D space are accessed and manipulated in VWM is unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine the influence of depth on object selection and manipulation within VWM.
• To differentiate the roles of object-based and spatial attention in 3D VWM.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a memory search task with colored items at near and far depth planes.
• Participants searched for a target and updated its color during memory maintenance.
• Manipulated object-based and spatial attention conditions.

Main Results:

• Object-based attention showed faster update times for near targets compared to far targets.
• This depth effect was absent in VWM with spatial attention and in visual search tasks.
• Spatial attention relied on 2D location, while object-based attention prioritized front plane representations.

Conclusions:

• Depth influences object selection and manipulation in VWM, particularly for object-based attention.
• Spatial attention in VWM operates on 2D location information, independent of depth.
• Ordinal spatial information guides object-based attention in 3D VWM.