title: Catching a glimpse of working memory: top-down capture as a tool for measuring the content of the mind.
abstract: This article outlines a methodology for probing working memory (WM) content in high-level cognitive tasks (e.g., decision making, problem solving, and memory retrieval) by capitalizing on attentional and oculomotor biases evidenced in top-down capture paradigms. This method would be of great use, as it could measure the information resident in WM at any point in a task and, hence, track information use over time as tasks dynamically evolve. Above and beyond providing a measure of information occupancy in WM, such a method would benefit from sensitivity to the specific activation levels of individual items in WM. This article additionally forwards a novel fusion of standard free recall and visual search paradigms in an effort to assess the sensitivity of eye movements in top-down capture, on which this new measurement technique relies, to item-specific memory activation (ISMA). The results demonstrate eye movement sensitivity to ISMA in some, but not all, cases.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK. ndlange@gmail.com
authors.forename: Nicholas D
authors.initials: ND
authors.lastname: Lange
authors.forename: Rick P
authors.initials: RP
authors.lastname: Thomas
authors.forename: Daniel R
authors.initials: DR
authors.lastname: Buttaccio
authors.forename: Eddy J
authors.initials: EJ
authors.lastname: Davelaar
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D005133:Eye Movements; D006801:Humans; D008568:Memory; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology; D011939:Mental Recall; D008960:Models, Psychological; D011340:Problem Solving; D011930:Reaction Time; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity