The Modulation Of The Precision Of Template Representation On Attentional Guidance From Working Memory

The relationship between working memory(WM)and selective attention has been widely studied.The contents of working memory can bias visual attention toward memory-related items in a top-down fashion.This phenomenon named as the memory driven attentional capture effect(or attentional guidance from working memory contents)and mainly consisted of two stages,first,the contents of working memory is encoded as the attentional template(also called the target template),secondly,comparing the degree of similarity between the visual input and the template representation in visual search,the tolerance and variability of template representation can directly affect this visual attention process.Here,we used a dual-task paradigm combined the working memory task and the visual search task and adopted the eye movement tracking technique to examine(1)whether the precision of attentional template representation influence on the memory driven attentional capture effect and(2)when did the precision of template representation play the role in the processing of attentional guidance.The participants in the present study were asked to search for a target among three distractors while holding a colored shape online in WM.During the visual search task,the memory-related item either reappeared as one of the distractors or did not reappear.We used different methods to motivate participants to store a high-precision or low-precision representation in WM and found that the magnitude of the capture effect under high-precision was smaller relative to low-precision condition on the eye movement data(Experiment 1),when excluded the influence of the cognitive resource,the results showed that there was no difference in the two precision conditions(Experiment 2,3).Then,we manipulated the similarity between memory contents and search distractor,respectively were physical-match(PM),mental-match(MM),low-similarity match(LM)and unrelated-match(UM),and there were no significant difference between the magnitude of the capture effect under different similarity levels(Experiment 4-7).However,when working memory contents do occasionally match the search target,eye movement data showed that more first fixation proportion under MM condition relative to PM and LM conditions,reveal a greater capture effect for MM condition and search RT data indicated that a smaller magnitude of the capture effect in LM condition relative to PM and MM conditions(Experiment 8).In conclusion,the present study illustrated that(1)the precision of representation can modulate the WM based attentional guidance by the means of competing for the common cognitive resources,the magnitude of the capture effect decreases as the memory task consumes more cognitive resources,this effect mainly occurs in the early stage of visual search and(2)attentional bias affected by similarity of representation through the task-relevant of working memory information,the magnitude of the capture is larger if the similarity between memory content and search stimulus is higher,(3)In case of the same cognitive resource consumption,the precision and similarity of the irrelevant working memory content do not affect the memory driven attentional capture effect,attentional template representation is highly flexible and tolerant during visual search,the attentional guidance mechanism by irrelevant working memory is a rough,intuitive,and dimension-based process.