Representations held in working memory (WM) are crucial in guiding human attention in a goal-directed fashion. Currently, it is debated whether only a single or several of these representations can be active and bias behaviour at any given moment. In our present study, 25 university students performed a behavioural dense-sampling experiment to produce an estimate of the temporal activation patterns of two simultaneously held visual templates. We report two key novel results. First, the performance related to both representations was not continuous, but fluctuated rhythmically at 6 Hz. This corresponds to neural oscillations in the theta-band, whose functional importance in WM is well established. Second, our findings suggest that two concurrently held representations may be prioritized in alternation, not simultaneously. Our data extend recent research on rhythmic sampling of external information by demonstrating an analogous mechanism in the cyclic activation of internal WM representations.

Recently, several behavioral studies have demonstrated 4-10 Hz rhythmic fluctuations in attention. So far, this attentional sampling has only been demonstrated with regards to external stimuli. Attention, however, is often directed towards internal working memory representations. We conducted a human behavioral dense-sampling experiment on whether simultaneously held representations of two distinct feature dimensions (color and orientation) also exhibit a rhythmic temporal profile. We found an oscillatory component at 9.4 Hz in the joint time-courses of both representations, presumably reflecting a common early perceptual sampling process in the alpha-frequency range. Further, we observed an oscillatory component at 3.5 Hz with a significant phase-difference between feature dimensions. This likely corresponds to a later attentional sampling process, indicating that internal representations of distinct features are activated in alteration. In summary, we demonstrate the cyclic reactivation of internal representations, as well as the co-occurrence of perceptual- and attentional rhythmic fluctuations at distinct frequencies.

It is debated how far-reaching effects of language on cognition are - if they exist at all. Using a visual search paradigm,we tested whether native Korean and German speakers are differentially sensitive to visual 3D-object composites thatonly the Korean, but not the German (nor the English), language semantically distinguishes as tight- versus loose-fit. Weinstructed our participants to search for a colour-defined target composite among distractors. However, targets were alsoimplicitly signalled by their tight- or loose-fit composites. Only Korean speakers picked up on this implicit target-definingcharacteristic, reflected in attention capture by target-similar composites. As these concepts are not grammticalised inthe German language, our results demonstrate that language can determine which visual features capture attention. Ourresearch introduces a novel approach because processing of the linguistically discriminated visual characteristics wasneither instructed nor necessary for the task, demonstrating a case of linguistic relativity of cognition.

According to linguistic relativity, the structure of a language influences its speaker’s cognition. To examine the generalization to non-linguistic tasks, we compared Korean and German native speakers. In Korean, a grammatical distinction forces to discriminate between tight and loose spatial relations, while in German, this falls into one single semantic category. In visual priming and masking experiments, we found 1) direct and 2) indirect evidence for linguistic relativity. 1) Congruence effects in the discrimination of tight/loose spatial relations only for Korean speakers and 2) a reduced efficiency of metacontrast masking (which relies on spatial fit between stimulus and mask) for Korean speakers, as attention was automatically captured by varying distances, according to their grammar. With object-substitution masks (where tightness of fit does not play a role), Korean speakers no longer outperformed German speakers. In our study, the highly practiced characteristics of one’s mother tongue affected attention and, hence, perception.

This study investigates the typological and grammatical influence of language (German and Korean) on linguistic expres-sions, visual perception, and recognition of caused spatial events. In German, a satellite-framed language, Path of motionis lexicalized in satellites, whereas in Korean, a verb-framed language, Path is typically lexicalized in the verb root. Wetested German and Korean native speakers in a linguistic description task as well as in a memory task involving eyetracking. Our results show that both verbal (linguistic expressions) and nonverbal (memory performance, eye movements)behaviors are determined at least in part by language-specific grammar. While Korean speakers principally categorizespatial relationships according to degree of fitness, German speakers do so based on containment or support.