Attention To Controlling The Focus Of Attention Information Maintained In Working Memory

The recent WM research literature more and more linked WM with the control of attention and it's scope. Some researchers suggested that the standard type of WM task involving separate storage-and-processing components correlate highly with aptitudes are due to the involvement of the controlling attention that cut across content domains, Others argue that to measure WM capacity on a common scale, it is necessary to co nsider the scope of attention instead of it's control. Simple spans and storage-and-proces sing spans as potentials cope-of-attention.It is important to make sure of the relationship between the control of attention and its scope in WM. Cowan supposed the people who are good at locking attention onto a goal during adversity are the same ones who are good at zooming attention out to apprehend the maximal number of items, or who have the widest attentional scope.]The control of attention underlies the scope of attentional focus.In this artickle, we tested this hypothesis by determining the effect of different levels of a stroop task or a timbre judgement task performed during the retention interval of a change-Detection task of meaningless shapes.In experiment 1,we found that the accuracy rate of change-detection task of meaningless shapes declined with the increase of disturb of the stroop task. and the response time of change-detection task increased with Stroop task's disturbed level.In experiment 2, we also found that the accuracy rate of change-detection task of meaningless shapes declined with the increase of disturbed level of the Timbre Judgement task. and the response time of change-detection task of meaningless shapes increased with the decrease of disturbed level in timbre judgement task.We can draw two conclusions from the two experiments: first, the scope of atention can be interfered by the control of attention。Second: the scope of attention can be interfered by the task of controlling attention, which content domains is completely different from the change-detection task. This support the opinion of Cowan who argue that the scope of attention can be interfered by the control of attention.