Abstract
Recent studies have shown that the representation of an item in visual working memory (VWM) can bias the deployment of attention to stimuli in the visual scene possessing the same features. When multiple item representations are simultaneously held in VWM, whether these representations, especially those held in a non-prioritized or accessory status, are able to bias attention, is still controversial. In the present study we adopted an eye tracking technique to shed light on this issue. In particular, we implemented a manipulation aimed at prioritizing one of the VWM representation to an active status, and tested whether attention could be guided by both the prioritized and the accessory representations when they reappeared as distractors in a visual search task. Notably, in Experiment 1, an analysis of first fixation proportion (FFP) revealed that both the prioritized and the accessory representations were able to capture attention suggesting a significant attentional guidance effect. However, such effect was not present in manual response times (RT). Most critically, in Experiment 2, we used a more robust experimental design controlling for different factors that might have played a role in shaping these findings. The results showed evidence for attentional guidance from the accessory representation in both manual RTs and FFPs. Interestingly, FFPs showed a stronger attentional bias for the prioritized representation than for the accessory representation across experiments. The overall findings suggest that multiple VWM representations, even the accessory representation, can simultaneously interact with visual attention.
Highlights
Recent studies have shown that the representation of an item in visual working memory (VWM) can bias the deployment of attention to stimuli in the visual scene possessing the same features
Since in studies reporting no attentional guidance from the accessory item representation[10,11,12,19], one of the items to be held in VWM was specified as target template of the visual search task, it is reasonable to assume that the participants implicitly assigned it an active, high-priority, status, which in turn resulted in weakening the guidance, if any, from the accessory item held in VWM
When prioritizing the status of one VWM representation by using a retrieval cue, can the other accessory representations in VWM guide visual attention? The present study addressed this issue by adopting an experimental procedure similar to that used by van Moorselaar et al.[23] with two relevant modifications
Summary
Recent studies have shown that the representation of an item in visual working memory (VWM) can bias the deployment of attention to stimuli in the visual scene possessing the same features. Peters and colleagues[10] asked participants to simultaneously hold a target and another non-target item in VWM and to judge whether the target appeared in the following rapid serial visual presentation task They observed that the distractor matching the features of the memorized items elicited comparable ERP responses to those elicited by distractors matching no features of the memorized items. Since in studies reporting no attentional guidance from the accessory item representation[10,11,12,19], one of the items to be held in VWM was specified as target template of the visual search task, it is reasonable to assume that the participants implicitly assigned it an active, high-priority, status, which in turn resulted in weakening the guidance, if any, from the accessory item held in VWM. When all VWM items were made relevant, both of the items were likely to be assigned an accessory status, which, in turn, could account for the observation that none of them exerted attentional guidance
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