Automatic Guidance Of Attention From Emotional Working Memory In Visual Search

There is a very close relationship between working memory and visual attention. Visual working memory content will guide attention orienting while visual working memory and attention share certain characteristics. From the initial start of the study, the issue that working memory deploys visual attention has triggered a lot controversy. On the one hand, consistent with the study of Downing in2000, Soto, Heinke, Humphreys fond that the feature or object held in working memory could capture visual attention automatically in2005. On the other hand, with the "memory-search" dual-task paradigm, Woodman and Luck proof that working memory didn’t capture attention automatically, but participants know the item match the content of working memory won’t be the search target, the content of working memory will guide the attention in a strategic way. Prominent valence differences have been identified in physiological reactivity, attentional focus, and long-term memory with negative emotions having a stronger impact than positive emotions. The effect is so pervasive that this phenomenon has been termed the "negativity bias"Most of the researches about working memory deploy visual attention focus on the objects. As we all know, people process emotion automatically as well as color or something else. So, what’s the effect of emotional working memory capture attention in visual search? There are three essential types of emotion:negative, positive and neutral. Will different types of emotion held in working memory result in different deployments of visual attention?The materials of experiment1were from Chinese Facial Affective Picture System. The results show that the emotion held in the working memory will capture attention automatically. But there’s no difference between negative and positive.Experiment2, the materials were schematic faces. They changed from mouth, eyes and forehead. The result shows that the negative emotion held in the working memory will capture attention automatically, but only in negative condition.In experiment3, we changed the factor matching type to matching and conflicting type. It contained three conditions:match&conflicting, nonmatch&non-conflicting and nonmatch&conflicting. The materials were same as experiment2. The results show that the negative emotion held in the working memory will capture attention automatically, but only in negative condition.Experiment4changed the materials to NimStim Set of Facial Expressions. So that we could control the detail information. And the suggestion is consistent with experiment2and3.According to the above4experiments, we may reach a conclusion:when the content of negative emotional working memory appears as interference stimulus, visual attention will be captured by the item matched working memory. And when the content of positive emotional working memory appears as interference stimulus, there’s no deployment of visual attention.