Attentional Selection Patterns Of Object Information During Encoding And Maintenance Of Visual Working Memor

Visual working memory and selective attention are crucial research areas in cognitive psychology.While some studies have suggested the presence of an object-based attention selection during the visual working memory encoding stage and a feature-based attention selection during the maintenance stage,these findings are based on different research paradigms,object feature dimensions,and response indicators.Therefore,it is important to exercise caution when drawing conclusions about the existence of distinct attention selection modes during different processing stages of visual working memory.This study employed the change detection paradigm,using the "task-irrelevant feature change distracting effect" as the observation index,and introduced the pre-cue and post-cue attentional cues.By presenting cue words before or after the memory screen,participants were prompted to select a specific feature of the object for memory,and the attentional selection mode of object information was examined during the visual working memory encoding and maintenance stages.In addition,to investigate the effect of memory load on attentional selection mode,the experiment was conducted in three parts.Experiment 1 examined the attentional selection mode during the visual working memory encoding and maintenance stages under low memory load conditions,while excluding the influence of trial type differences(Experiment 1a/1b/1c).Experiments 2 and 3 respectively examined the attentional selection mode during the visual working memory encoding and maintenance stages under medium and high memory load conditions.All experiments used a within-subject design of 2(cue type: precue,post-cue)x(task-irrelevant feature change type: change,no change),recorded participants’ reaction time(RT)and accuracy,and calculated sensitivity and report standard indicators based on signal detection theory(SDT).Three experimental results showed that in the pre-cue trial,the performance of participants’ awareness of task-relevant feature changes was significantly distracted with by task-irrelevant feature changes.This was manifested by slower reaction times and lower criterion in the condition with task-irrelevant feature changes compared to the condition without changes.Analysis across experiments revealed that this distracting effect was not affected by memory load.However,in the retro-cue trial,distracting effects only existed under low memory load conditions(Experiment 1a/1b/1c),and disappeared when memory load increased(Experiment2/3).These results indicate that during the encoding stage of visual working memory,both taskrelevant and task-irrelevant features are encoded into visual working memory and compete for attentional resources.However,during the maintenance stage,task-irrelevant features are only processed under low memory load conditions,and insufficient resources lead to their inability to be processed as the demand for attentional resources for task-relevant features increases.In conclusion,this study finds that different attentional selection modes exist in different processing stages of visual working memory.Specifically,the encoding stage is based on object-based attention selection mode,while the maintenance stage is based on feature-based attention selection mode.Additionally,the attention selection mode in the maintenance stage is regulated by memory load.