The Impact Of Task Difficulty On Attention Guidance Process

Attention guidance effect means that attention will be biased towards that stimulus when working memory and visual search share the same or similar characteristics of that stimulus.Previous studies had found the evidences that task difficulty play a role in regulating the process of attention-guiding effects,and the task difficulty was generally studied from two perspectives of working memory load and perceptual load.Most studies increased the load by increasing the number of memory items and the number of search items.This study re-manipulated the definitions of working memory load and perceptual load to explore how task difficulty affected the process of non-target attention-guiding effects.The classic paradigm in the field,the dual task paradigm and its variants were used to collect data on behavior and eye movement indicators.Experiment 1 explored how different working memory loads affect the attention-guiding effect process by manipulating the central control’s cognitive control resources(N-back tasks),which were more closely related to the inhibition process.The results show that under low working memory load conditions,in terms of the percentage of the first fixation point of the eye movement index,the invalid condition was significantly larger than the neutral condition.The response time in the invalid condition was significantly faster than the neutral condition,indicating that there was both early attention capture and late attention suppression under low working memory load conditions;Under the condition of high working memory load,the percentage of the first fixation point of the eye movement index between the invalid condition and the neutral condition was not significant,and the reaction time between the invalid condition and the neutral condition was not significant.These results meant there were not early attention capture or late attention suppression under low working memory load.Experiment2 explored the similarity between the target and the interference stimulus by manipulating the visual search to explore the effect of different perceptual loads on the process of attention-guiding effects.The results showed,percentage of the first fixation point of the eye movement index of the invalid condition was significantly greater than the neutral conditions,which showed there were only early attention capture under low perceptual load;Under high perceptual load,the invalid condition in the percentage of the first fixation point of the eye movement index was significantly greater than the neutral condition,but less than the capture amount under the low perceptual load condition,and the response time of the invalid condition was significantly faster than the neutral condition.Theseresults showed,because of cognitive control participation,there were late attention suppression but less early attention capture under high perceptual load.Conclusions:(1)The process of attention-directed effects in non-target working memory representations,about early attention capture and late attention rejection,would be affected by cognitive resources.Early attention capture was not fully automated and required certain cognitive resources to be more stable;Later attention rejection would appear when the task required cognitive resources and cognitive control,and the exertion of cognitive control required a certain amount of time resources.(2)Task difficulty(working memory load and perceptual load)essentially affected the attention-guiding effect in a way that cost cognitive resources.