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

A key problem that the mind has to solve is gating which information will be stored in memory. The conventional idea of sensory attention as a working memory (WM) selection mechanism is widely accepted. The present studies challenged this traditional view by showing that even fully attended information may not be encoded into WM, indicating a WM reselection process for attended information. More importantly, the mechanism of WM reselection was explored and the surprising finding was that the reselection operates 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 neural mechanisms of memory formation.