Abstract
Stimuli of great social relevance exogenously capture attention. Here we explored the impact of body-related stimuli on endogenous attention. Additionally, we investigate the influence of internal states on biased attention towards this class of stimuli. Participants were presented with a body, face, or chair cue to hold in memory (Memory task) or to merely attend (Priming task) and, subsequently, they were asked to find a circle in an unrelated visual search task. In the valid condition, the circle was flanked by the cue. In the invalid condition, the pre-cued picture re-appeared flanking the distracter. In the neutral condition, the cue item did not re-appear in the search display. We found that although bodies and faces benefited from a general faster visual processing compared to chairs, holding them in memory did not produce any additional advantage on attention compared to when they are merely attended. Furthermore, face cues generated larger orienting effect compared to body and chairs cues in both Memory and Priming task. Importantly, results showed that individual sensitivity to internal bodily responses predicted the magnitude of the memory-based orienting of attention to bodies, shedding new light on the relationship between body awareness and visuo-spatial attention.
Highlights
Visuo spatial attention tunes behavioural and neural processing in order to select relevant stimuli among others within the environment[1]
Previous research indicates that social stimuli exert an exogenous shift of attention, less is known about the endogenous effects from working memory (WM) on attention
In line with previous findings, our results demonstrated that holding a cue in WM implied a behavioural cost, resulting in slower reaction times (RTs) in the Memory compared to the Priming task[10,11,15,25]
Summary
Visuo spatial attention tunes behavioural and neural processing in order to select relevant stimuli among others within the environment[1]. Visuo-spatial attention is attracted towards stimuli matching the content of memory, such as a certain location in space[8,9], or a certain stimulus[10,11] These representations become a “search template” (or “attentional set”) provided by memory, which may bias attention diminishing or increasing reaction times (RTs) in visual search[10,12,13,14]. Holding in WM such stimulus categories may be effective at capturing visual attention, because salient items have privileged access to WM19 To test this hypothesis, we administered thirty-three healthy participants with a previously published memory-based attention paradigm[17,18], varying the nature of the stimuli with bodies, chairs, and faces. We hypothesized that if bodily state influences perception, the level of body awareness would modulate the biased orienting of attention for body-related stimuli
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