The influence of representation on working memory-driven attentional capture
Date Issued
2014
Date
2014
Author(s)
Kuo, Chun-Yu
Abstract
The relationship between working memory and selective attention has been demonstrated by numerous studies which showed that the content of working memory biases attention. This effect, working memory-driven attentional capture, has been well demonstrated in the literature. However, few studies have investigated how the characteristics of the representation maintained in working memory may influence the capturing effect. This doctoral dissertation aims to address this issue across three studies using a dual-task paradigm that combines a memory related task and an attentional selection task. The participants in all studies were required to maintain an item in working memory for a later memory-related test while performing a motion judgment task. In the motion judgment task, the participants were required to judge the direction of a moving target. The memorized item was identical to the moving target in the valid condition; the memorized item was identical to the static distractor in the invalid condition; and the memorized item was not presented in the display of the motion judgment task in the neutral condition. The capturing effect was reflected by faster performance in the valid condition than in the neutral condition, or slower performance in the invalid condition than in the neutral condition. Study 1 focused on the effect of attentional tag associated with the information maintained in working memory. The memory related task showed two colored notched circles after the selection task. Attentional tag was manipulated by assigning the memorized color to be the to-be-judged and the to-be-ignored color in the target and distractor block, respectively. The results showed that the attentional tag modulated working memory-driven attentional capture. The color tagged as a target captured attention and reduced the reaction time for the motion judgment task, and the color tagged as a distractor did not capture attention. The goal of Study 2 was to examine how pre-existing representation in long-term memory modulated the capture effect driven by the individual component of the stimulus stored in working memory. The participants were required to remember letters which formed a word, pronounceable pseudoword, or nonword and then performed a motion judgment task. The results showed that the individual letters of a word or pronounceable pseudoword captured attention whereas letters of a nonword did not. In the nonword condition, reappearance of the complete visual representation is necessary for inducing the capturing effect. In Study 3, a naming task was used to replace the memory recognition task for eliminating potential strategic perceptual resampling, which may have played a role in several previous studies. The probability that the verbalized item is identical to the selection targets, the prime validity, was manipulated across experiments. The results showed a large capturing effect when the validity was higher than the chance level, but the capturing effect was not observed when the prime validity was lower than the chance level. The results suggested that contingency associated with the representation also modulated working memory-driven attentional capture. The content of working memory appears to capture attention as a default mode when there is no reason to avoid the influence of primes, and it is subject to strategic control based on the cognitive set. Taken together, the content of working memory does not automatically capture attention. The characteristics of the representation (the attentional tag, accessibility to pre-existing representation, and contingency related to attentional target) can modulate the working memory-driven attentional capture effect. Working memory and attention interact in a flexible manner.
Subjects
工作記憶
選擇注意力
認知控制
注意力標籤
既有表徵
共伴性
Type
thesis
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