Mechanisms Undering The Guidance For Working Memory To Attention

Working memory can maintain and process the information that enters the brain through the visual channel,reflecting the ability of individuals to process multiple kinds of information at the same time,and plays a very important role in many cognitive activities of a person.For example,individuals with strong working memory have better performance in arithmetic and reasoning cognitive activities.Visual attention reflects the ability of individuals to effectively select objects in the outside world as focus of attention.In recent years,the interaction between working memory and visual attention has been concerned and discussed by many researchers.Among them,different researchers give different theoretical explanations about how information that stored in working memory guides visual attention.According to the biased competition model,work memory content are kept as attention template,and memory-matching stimulus always captures attention.In contrast,the visual attention theory believes that the guiding process of the working memory content is flexible and controllable,which can capture attention and suppress attention.Based on this,this study designes three series of experiments to provide further experimental supports to resolve the dispute between the two theoretics.First,Experiment 1 examines the guiding mechanism of working memory for attention by comparing the amount of working memory content appearing in the visual search as the number of distracting objects.It was found that when the number of memory-matching distractors appeared different,the difference in behavioral response times was not significant,but they were longer than the baseline conditions that there was no memory content and only the target and target analogs appeared.This confirmes that visual information reappeares in the search array to capture the attention of the subject.At the same time,the probability of memory-matching items in our experiments was 80%.Combined with previous studies,when the probability is high enough,the object working memory content will be used as a template for “stimulus to be suppressed”.Therefore,the first capture and then inhibitory effect of the working memory content on the attention was confirmed by Experiment 1.Next,the results of Experiment 1 were further verified by two experiments.Experiment 1 may have a situation in which the test strategy finds three objects of the same color.Because the target item must appear in three objects of the same color,and there is no matching interference in the baseline condition,the reaction time is faster than the control test.In Experiment 2,three interfering substances with the same color as the memory item were added on the basis of the threesearch target items to exclude the strategy of finding three identical colors.It was found that the difference in the search response time of the three conditions was not significant,which further confirmes the result of Experiment 1,that is,there is a refusal effect of working memory on the first capture after attention.However,there is still an explanation for the results of Experiment 1.Compared with the baseline conditions,and subject took time to reject the distractors in high-capacity matching conditions and low-capacity matching conditions,so them took a long time.It may not be caused by the capture effect of the working memory content on the attention.Therefore,in Experiment 3,in order to prove whether there is a capture of the attention of the working memory content,we set the contrast condition in Experiment 3.Therefore,both conditions need to be rejected,thereby balancing the influence of rejecting the interference on the result,and exploring whether memory-matching condition has a capture.It was found that search response of the memory-matching condition is longer than the memory-mismatch condition,which indicates that there is a attention capture effect based on working memory.In summary,the three experiments together support the presence of multiple memory-matching distractors in the search array first captures the participants' attention,and then participants would become aware of the distractive role of VWM content in the visual search.As a result,all memory-matched distractors would be rejected as a whole,...