Investigating The Mechanisms Of Exogenous Cueing Effects:Attentional Facilitation And Memory-Encoding-Induced Cost

Spatial-based visual selective attention refers to an individual’s cognitive ability to selectively focus on information at specific spatial locations while disregarding information from other locations when facing a large amount of visual information.The spatial cueing paradigm is one of the classic paradigms used to study spatial attention.The observed cueing effect,cost effect,and benefit effect within this paradigm are collectively referred to as spatial cueing effects.Numerous researchers have provided explanations for the mechanisms underlying these attentional effects using different theories,such as attentional allocation theory,attentional gating theory,and noise exclusion theory.These attention theories emphasize different aspects when explaining the spatial cueing effects,however,within a particular theory,three types of spatial cueing effects are driven by the same mechanism.For instance,these attention theories predict that an enhancement of the cueing effect will lead to corresponding enhancements of the cost and benefit effects,demonstrating a consistent pattern of change among the three effects.Although previous research has largely supported these attention theories,there have also been some results that are difficult to explain using the aforementioned theories.Recently,Chen and Wyble(2018)proposed the Memory encoding cost(MEC)theory to provide a reasonable explanation for these results.This theory posits that there are two distinct mechanisms involved in exogenous spatial cueing effects: attentional enhancement of target processing at the cued location(i.e.,Attentional facilitation mechanism)and nonspatiotopic attentional suppression of subsequent target processing due to the memory encoding of cue information(i.e.,encoding-induced cost mechanism).Exogenous cueing effects result from the combination consequences of these two mechanisms.However,the exploration of the MEC theory is still in its infancy,and the supporting evidence is limited to specific paradigm and indicator,with a lack of investigation into the relationship between the two mechanisms.The present study aimed to comprehensively investigate these two issues of the MEC theory to elucidate the cognitive mechanisms and neural basis underlying exogenous cueing effects and ultimately refine the theory.Study 1 aimed to investigate the generality of the encoding-induced cost mechanism.This part systematically examined the role of the encoding-induced cost mechanism in different types of exogenous cueing effects,using the asymmetrical modulation of enhanced memory encoding of cue on the cost and benefit effects as a key criterion.The results of Experiments 1 to 4 demonstrated the presence of the encoding-induced cost mechanism in reaction-time-based,auditory,social,and contingent exogenous cueing effects,respectively.Study 2 aimed to investigate whether the encoding-induced cost mechanism and the attentional facilitation mechanism are independent of each other.The MEC theory suggests that encoding-induced cost and attentional facilitation mechanisms are primarily reflected by the cost and cueing effects,respectively.This study employed a combination of behavioral and electroencephalography(EEG)experiments to explore this issue.In the behavioral experiments,Experiments 5 to 7 found that the cueing and cost effects were modulated differently by the same factors: an increase in the number of cues led to larger cost effect but smaller cueing effect(Experiment 5),expectation violation resulted in larger cost effect but unchanged cueing effect(Experiment 6),and working-memory-guided attention resulted in unchanged cost effect but larger cueing effect(Experiment 7).In the EEG experiment(Experiment 8),decoding accuracy,reflecting the strength of the cue location representation in the brain,was obtained using EEG decoding techniques.The results demonstrated that the peak value of decoding accuracy was only positively correlated with the cost effect and unrelated to the cueing effect.Based on the above results,the following main conclusions can be drawn:(1)The encoding-induced cost mechanism exhibits generality and can operate in different types of exogenous cueing effects.(2)The encoding-induced cost and attentional facilitation mechanism both induced by exogenous cues are independent and represent distinct mechanisms.(3)The strength of the cue location representation in the brain is solely associated with the encoding-induced cost mechanism and unrelated to the attentional facilitation mechanism.In summary,this research not only contributes to understanding the commonalities in attentional mechanisms across different exogenous cues but also provides insights into the mechanisms underlying exogenous cueing effects from a novel perspective of the interaction between attention and memory.Moreover,this research holds practical implications for fields such as advertising and marketing,as well as military industry and security.