Irene Echeverria-Altuna^1,3, Jewel Cox¹, Kia Nobre^1,2; ¹Department of Psychology, Yale University, ²Wu Tsai Institute, Yale University, ³Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL; Spain)

Attention can be directed to sensory events (external attention) and to memory contents (internal attention). Predictable temporal structures guide external attention dynamically and proactively to anticipated onsets of relevant sensory events with good temporal resolution. Temporal expectations also modulate access to working-memory (WM) representations, but much less is known about the dynamic profile of these internal attention functions. We investigated how we use time to select and shift between WM contents. Participants encoded the angles of two tilted gratings into WM. Gratings appeared within separate circular, colored placeholders on the left and right of the screen. At the end of the trial, participants reproduced the tilt of one of the WM items. Which item participants reported was predicted by the combination of a retrocue and the subsequent delay. A colored retrocue during the WM delay predicted that participants would be probed on the item matching the cue color after a short (1 sec) delay or on the other item after a long (2.5 sec) delay. Using variations of this task, we investigated the time course of the behavioural advantages conferred by internal temporal attention. In Experiment 1 (n =30), the cue validly predicted the timing of the item to be reported on most trials (80%), but, on other trials, an item could be probed along several intervals spanning (0.5-2.7 s after cue offset). Responses at validly and invalidly cued times revealed a dynamic profile of attentional benefit, with progressive response speeding toward the expected timing of the probe. Interestingly, accuracy-related benefits were more pronounced for items that were expected to be probed early. Ongoing studies are investigating whether temporal orienting in WM yields behavioral costs in addition to benefits. The findings provide insights into how temporal regularities shape the dynamics of selecting WM contents in the service of adaptive behavior.