Attentional Guidance From Event Working Memory And Its Underlying Cognitive Mechanism

Visual working memory(VWM)is in charge of the temporal storage and manipulation of a limited set of visual information,playing a critical role in our daily activities.Amounts of studies show that VWM affects information selection at the stage of visual perception.Particularly,VWM automatically and rapidly biases attention towards the item matching the VWM content in a scene,exhibiting attentional guidance from VWM.Such effect suggests an intimate relation between VWM and attention,and has received increasing attention in the VWM field.So far,all attentional guidance studies tapped the VWM storage and visual search of static objects.However,events,which contain dynamic spatio-temporal information(e.g.,biological motion),is the foundamental unit of the cognitive system in processing the dynamic world.Moreover,events have an independent storage buffer from static objects in VWM(i.e.,event working memory,EWM),with distinct processing mechanisms.Therefore,the mechanisms underlying attentional guidance from VWM revealed by static objects may not fit for events.The current study hence explored whether EWM can guide attention during event perception(Section one),and its underlying cognitive mechanisms(Section two).A dual-task paradigm was adopted: Participants firstly memorized a visual event;then they fulfilled an event search task during the EWM maintenance phase,wherein the memorized event might be reappeared.If EWM could guide attention,the reappearance of the memorized event would affect the search performance.Section one(Experiments 1-3)found that the reappearance of memorized event during the search task prolonged the search time regardless of event types(Experiment 1).Moreover,it delayed the time to fix at the search target from the second round of fixation(Experiment 2),even when the differences among events emerged from the very beginning(Experiment 3).These results suggested that EWM can guide attention during event perception,but not at an early stage of visual search.Section two(Experiments 4-9)further explored the underlying cognitive mechanisms of EWM guidance.Results confirmed that the attentional guidence by EWM had a distinct mechanism from the one of static object,which took place at an early stage of visual search(Experiment 4).The EWM guidance contained a continuous dynamic matching process,which can be terminated(Experiment 5).Advancing the matching process of the target event terminated attentional guidance from EWM(Experiment6),while balancing the time-course competition of dynamic matching between the memorized event and search target re-established the attentional guidance(Experiment 7).Finally,the dynamic matching process did not involve a full comparsion with the stored event in working memory,since the duration of the memorized event did not affect attentional guidance from EWM under either a balanced matching time-course(Experiment 8)or an unbalanced one(Experiment 9).The current study draws the following conclusions:(1)EWM can affect the deployment of attention in event cognition,but not at an early stage of visual serach and can be terminated.(2)The time-course competition between dynamic matching processes of memorized event and search target constitutes the boundary of attentional guidance from EWM.(3)The dynamic matching process does not need a full comparsion with the stored representation in EWM.