Abstract
Recent studies have found that visual working memory (VWM) for color shows a categorical bias: observers typically remember colors as more prototypical to the category they belong to than they actually are. Here, we further examine color-category effects on VWM using pupillometry. Participants remembered a color for later reproduction on a color wheel. During the retention interval, a colored probe was presented, and we measured the pupil constriction in response to this probe, assuming that the strength of constriction reflects the visual saliency of the probe. We found that the pupil initially constricted most strongly for non-matching colors that were maximally different from the memorized color; this likely reflects a lack of visual adaptation for these colors, which renders them more salient than memory-matching colors (which were shown before). Strikingly, this effect reversed later in time, such that pupil constriction was more prolonged for memory-matching colors as compared to non-matching colors; this likely reflects that memory-matching colors capture attention more strongly, and perhaps for a longer time, than non-matching colors do. We found no effects of color categories on pupil constriction: after controlling for color distance, (non-matching) colors from the same category as the memory color did not result in a different pupil response as compared to colors from a different category; however, we did find that behavioral responses were biased by color categories. In summary, we found that pupil constriction to colored probes reflects both visual adaptation and VWM content, but, unlike behavioral measures, is not notably affected by color categories.
Highlights
Introduction& Luck, 2013; Olivers, Meijer, & Theeuwes, 2006; Wolfe & Gray, 2007; Zhou, Lorist, & Mathôt, 2020)
To foresee the results, we found no difference in the pupil response to slightly mismatching stimuli as a function of whether or not they share the same category as the memory color; this suggests that color-category effects in visual working memory (VWM) do not notably affect the levels of visual processing that are reflected in our pupil-size measure
We used pupillometry to investigate attentional capture by stimuli that match the content of visual working memory (VWM) for color, and how such memory-driven capture is affected by categorical biases
Summary
& Luck, 2013; Olivers, Meijer, & Theeuwes, 2006; Wolfe & Gray, 2007; Zhou, Lorist, & Mathôt, 2020). Such interactions between VWM and attention have been extensively studied, often using color as the relevant feature (Allred & Flombaum, 2014). The aim of the present study is to further examine how VWM for color influences visual attention towards color, as well as the importance of color categories here-in, using a new pupillometric technique that was recently introduced by Olmos-Solis, van Loon, and Olivers (2018; see Binda & Murray, 2015)
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