A new aspect of cognitive selectivity: Working memory reselection for attended information

The selective function of brain is classically characterized by attentional mechanism. The current study proposed a new cognitive selectivity—working memory (WM) reselection process that could be distinguished from attentional selection. The first section of the present study provided both behavioral and neuroscientific evidence showing that even fully attended information was not ever encoded into WM, indicating there exists a WM reselection process for attended information. More importantly, in the second section, the mechanism of WM reselection was explored and the surprising finding was that the reselection operated through a dimensional-memory-filter. That is, the brain could selectively encode the attended information from one feature dimension while blocking others from another dimension at the same time. However, once a feature is selected, all concurrently attended information from the same dimension would be automatically encoded into WM regardless of whether they are necessary for the task. These findings have critical implications for understanding the mechanisms of memory formation.