Attention Capture By Different Types Of Visual Working Memory Representation

The relationship between visual working memory and attention has been attracting much interest by researchers.Many studies have shown that visual working memory representation can effectively guide attention.In recent years,there has been controversial that the attention guide by visual working memory representation exactly is the single-item-template or the multiple-item-template.What factors are in effect? There are still less study on the issue.To solve the above problems,three experiments were designed to explore the influence on representation types and memory time on visual working memory representation capturing attention by adopting the dual-task paradigm of visual working memory task and visual search task.In Experiment 1,color feature with a presentation time of 250 ms was used as the memory item to explore whether the visual working memory representation of two single-feature objects can simultaneously capture attention.Experiment 2 still used the color feature as the memory item,but its representation time was extended to 1000 ms,aiming to further explore whether the visual working memory representation of two single-feature objects can simultaneously capture attention when the memory time was sufficient.In Experiment 3,we further discussed whether the visual working memory representation of two multiple-feature objects can capture attention simultaneously by using the combination of color and texture features as memory item.The present study found that when the memory item was the color feature,whether the memory time was sufficient or not,there was no significant difference between the attention capture effect for Memory-1 / Match-1(when the number of memory item is one,the attention capture effect of a visual working memory representation)and Memory-2 / Match-2(when the number of memory item is two,the attention capture effect of two visual working memory representation)conditions,and the attention capture effect was significantly larger for Memory-1 / Match-1 condition than for Memory-2 / Match-1(when the number of memory item is two,the attention capture effectof one of two visual working memory representation)condition.However,when the memory item was the combination of color and texture features,the attention capture effect for Memory-2/ Match-2 condition had a tendency to be significantly larger than that for Memory-1 / Match-1condition,and the difference of capture effect between Memory-1 / Match-1 and Memory-2 /Match-1 conditions was not significant.Therefore,the conclusions are as follows:(1)When the memory items are the single-feature object,whether the memory items are given sufficient memory time or not,the two visual working memory representations cannot capture attention simultaneously,which supports the single-item-template hypothesis.(2)When the memory items are multiple-feature object,two visual working memory representations can capture attention simultaneously,which supports the multiple-item-template hypothesis.