Abstract
Previous research has suggested that visual working memory (VWM) contents had a guiding effect on selective attention, and once participants realized that the distractors shared the same information with VWM contents in the search task, they would strategically inhibit the potential distractors with VWM contents. However, previous behavioral studies could not reveal the way how distractors with VWM contents are inhibited strategically. By employing the eye-tracking technique and a dual-task paradigm, we manipulated the probability of memory items occurring as distractors to explore this issue. Consistent with previous behavioral studies, the results showed that the inhibitory effect occurred only in the high-probability condition, while the guiding effect emerged in the low-probability condition. More importantly, the eye-movement results indicated that in the high-probability condition, once few (even one) distractors with VWM contents were captured at first, all the remaining distractors with VWM contents would be rejected as a whole. However, in the low-probability condition, attention could be captured by the majority of distractors with VWM contents. These results suggested that the guiding effect of VWM contents on attention is involuntary in the early stage of visual search. After the completion of this involuntary stage, the guiding effect of task-irrelevant VWM contents on attention could be strategically controlled.
Highlights
The working memory system plays an important role in human cognition, as it enables our brains to retain and manipulate external information temporarily[1,2,3,4]
By adopting the event-related potentials (ERP) technique, Kumar et al.[13] found that the amplitude of N2pc was larger in an ipsilateral invalid matching condition, compared with the neutral condition and a contralateral invalid matching condition
For the interpretation of the results, Woodman and Luck[21] proposed that once participants were aware of the distractive role of visual working memory (VWM) content in the search task, they would strategically exclude it into a rejection template to inhibit all potential memory-matched distractors
Summary
The subsequent analysis showed that in terms of the first item scanned, the main effect of probability was not significant, F(1,28) = 0.42, p > 0.1, η2 = 0.03; the main effect of type of trials was significant, F(1,28) = 63.03, p < 0.01, η2 = 0.55; and the interaction effect was not significant, F(1,28) = 0.68, p > 0.1, η2 = 0.01 This result indicated that when the memory items appeared as distractors in the visual search task, the memory-matched distractors would attract more attentional resources compared with the non-memory-matched distractors in spite of a high or low occurrence probability. Simple effect analysis showed that in the high-probability condition, the percentage of searched non-target-analogue items was significantly lower in the memory distraction trials than in the control distraction trials, F(1,14) = 10.30, p < 0.01, η2 = 0.27. The results indicated that in the high-probability condition, after being attracted by the first memory-matched distractor, the participants were very likely to stop discriminating the opening direction of the square-frame that was embedded in the rectangle and directly shift their fixation away from the memory-matched distractors
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