Location Has a Privilege, but It Is Limited: Evidence from Probing Task Irrelevant Location

Abstract

We investigated the extent of automaticity in location and orientation encoding by manipulating the task relevance of these features and assessing the amount of resources recruited by their encoding. Separate groups of participants were surprised with a location report trial (experiment 1) or an orientation report trial (experiment 2) at a point when only the item’s color had been task relevant. This was followed by control trials to assess the memory quality when location or orientation had become task relevant along with color. We found the surprise trial performance to be significantly worse than the first control trial for both location and orientation, but to a greater extent for orientation. Moreover, the control trials revealed reduced precision for color in both experiments. These results suggest that location encoding had much greater automaticity than orientation, but neither could be encoded in a completely automatic manner. All results were obtained with pre-registered experiments that replicated a separate set of initial experiments we performed. Our results are consistent with a graded, nondichotomous view of automaticity and have implications on the organizational structure of VWM representations.