The Strategic Influence Of Working Memory On Attention

The biased-competition model have suggested that sensory inputs matching the contents of working memory will have an automatic advantage in the comopetition for processing recources. The author tested the hypothesis by requiring observers to search for a non-specific target while concurrently maintaining object representation in visual working-memory. However,no evidence for automatic attentional capture was obtained. Instead,the experimental results show that the influence of working memory on perception is controlled,but not automatic.Experiment one used an approach that was based on previous studies of Downing and Dodds (2004) 's to establish whether working memory automatically attract attention. The experiment required observers to perform a visual search task while concurrently maintaining object representation in visual working memory, on 50% of the trials ,the shapes of all the four pictures in the visual search array were different from the shape of the memory obect.on the other 50% of the trials,one of the distractor objects was drawn in the same shape as that of the memory object. The results showed that visual search RTs were virtually identical for the mismatching-distractor trials and the matching-distractor trials.These results provided evidence that the attention was not automatically drawn to items that were similar to the contents of working memory.The goal experiment two was to further genelize the results of experiment one,by requiring observers to search a non-specific target,but not a specific picture as in experiment one. .The results showed that visual search RT was slower for the mismatching-distractor trials than for the matching-distractor trials. The difference was statistically significant. These results provided further evidence that even if the search target was non-specific , attention was not automatically drawn to items that were similar to the contents of working memory. However ,the results can be explained by the strategic perceptual resampling hypothesis.In order to further prove the strategic perceptual resampling hypothesis, experiment three arrange renewedly the orders of trials in experiment two. Specifically, the mismatching-distractor trials were arranged to be present in the first half,and the matching-distractor trials in the second half. The results showed that visual search RT was faster for the mismatching-distractor trials than for the matching-distractor trials. The pattern of results was the opposite of experiment two's.However,the seemingly paradoxical results just further proved the strategic perceptual resampling hypothesis.In summary ,the results of the study proved even if the search target was non-specific,the influence of working memory on selective attention was non automatica,but controlled and strategic.