Motion-based Attention Underlies the Rehearsal of Biological Motion in Working Memory

Holding biological motions (BM) - the movements of animate entities, in working memory (WM) is important to our daily social life. Previous studies have documented that there is a specific buffer dedicated to keeping BM in WM. However, no study has explored the attentional mechanism underlying maintaining BM in WM. Considering that it has been suggested that object-based attention underlies the rehearsal of object information (e.g., color) in object WM, we hypothesized that motion-based attention, instead of object-based attention, underlies the rehearsal of BM in WM. Consequently, we required the participants to memorize colors or BM in different blocks. Moreover, we inserted a secondary motion task to consume motion-based attention, or an object-feature-report task to consume object-based attention. We found a significant larger impairment for BM than for colors with a secondary motion task, yet a significant larger impairment for colors than for BM with a secondary an object-feature-report task. Taken together, these results suggest that motion-based attention plays a pivotal role in maintaining BM in WM. (Acknowledgement: This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 31271089,31170975)) Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015