Effects Of Reward Directing Attention And Space-Based Attention On VWM Representation

Visual working memory(VWM)is a system with limited capacity that can temporarily store and process visual information.Attention can filter the visual information related to tasks into VWM,as well as select some information for priority processing.In recent years,studies on reward-guided attention and visual working memory have received much attention.Researchers guided attention by manipulating the reward value of correct recall items,and the results showed that high reward items had better performance than low reward items,which they believed could be maintained better in the focus of attention(FoA).In addition,when multiple objects are presented simultaneously,reward-guided attention depends not only on execution attention,but also on space-based attention during the information encoding process.However,it is still unclear that in which stage reward-guided attention consume space-based attention resources when multiple objects are presented simultaneously,and why different reward items have variational memory performances.We conducted two experiments to explore the effects of reward-guided attention and space-based attention on VWM representation.Experiment 1 adopted a dual-task paradigm to explore whether the effect of reward-guided attention on VWM was due to the consumption of space-based attention resources.Attention was guided by assigning different reward values to memory objects and a probe-detection task was inserted which could consume spatial-based attention during the VWM retention interval.In experiment 2,participants were asked to perform a simultaneous visual-working-memory task as well to measure where their gaze was directed.By requiring participants to freely move their eyes during the VWM retention interval or fixate a central point throughout each trial,we discussed what is the reason for the different memory performances of different reward items.It was found that the recallaccuracy of high reward objects was significantly higher than other objects;the dual-task reduced the recall accuracy of low-reward objects,but did not affect the performance of high-reward objects;during the retention interval,compared with fixation condition,eye-movements improved the recall performance;in the eye-movement condition,participants spontaneously fixated the spatial locations that had been occupied by the objects in the memory array,and the number of saccades in the high-reward object locations were significantly higher than the other areas..In general,the conclusions of the study are as follows.When multiple objects are simultaneously presented,the consumption of space-based attention resources during the VWM retention interval has no effect on high-reward items,while reducing the accuracy of low-reward items.The main reason may be that more attention is paid to high-reward items during the VWM retention interval,or that attention resources are redistributed during the retention interval,and high-reward items receive more attention.