It has been found that a spatial cue in perception causes benefits through target facilitation at low external noise but noise reduction at high external noise. Assuming that mnemonic attention is similar to perceptual attention, we propose that how a spatial retro-cue is used depends on internal noise. To test this hypothesis, we manipulated internal noise with memory load. We focused on questioning whether/why there was a difference between peripheral and central retro-cues at low or high internal noise. In Experiments 1 and 2, we consistently found that peripheral retro-cues were more effective than central retro-cues at low internal noise. Results from Experiments 3–5 showed that this difference was due to a voluntary process of target facilitation, which happened much earlier on peripheral than central retro-cue trials. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis and indicated that mnemonic attention and perceptual attention could be incorporated into one framework. Nevertheless, spatial retro-cues, including peripheral ones, relied on voluntary control to become effective, different from peripheral cues in perception. To conclude, our findings suggest that the effects of spatial cues on memory and perception are similar but not identical.

已经发现，感知中的空间线索通过在低外部噪声下促进目标而在高外部噪声下通过降噪来产生益处。假设记忆注意类似于感知注意，我们建议如何使用空间复古提示取决于内部噪声。为了检验这个假设，我们使用内存负载来操纵内部噪声。我们专注于质疑在低或高内部噪声下，外围和中央复古线索之间是否/为什么存在差异。在实验 1 和 2 中，我们始终发现在低内部噪声下，外围复古提示比中央复古提示更有效。实验 3-5 的结果表明，这种差异是由于目标促进的自愿过程造成的，这种过程发生在外围比中央逆向提示试验要早得多。这些发现与假设一致，并表明记忆注意和知觉注意可以合并到一个框架中。然而，空间回溯线索，包括外围线索，依赖于自愿控制才能发挥作用，这与感知上的外围线索不同。总而言之，我们的研究结果表明，空间线索对记忆和感知的影响是相似的，但并不完全相同。