Guidance Of Attention From The Content Of Working Memory In High Perceptual Load Condition

The locus of selection in the flow of information processing is a central question in attention theory, which attracted lots of researcher’s attention on it. Early-selection account suggests that the capacity of perception is limited, and the attention selection happened after rudimentary analysis of physical features. Consequently, only to-be-selected stimuli are fully perceived. By contrast, the late-selection approach believed that the perception is not limited, and all the stimuli are processed in parallel. After full perception the attentional selection occurred. Some researchers proposed a perceptual load theory of selective attention offers a possible resolution to this long standing debate between early-selection and late-selection views. According to the load theory, the capacity of perceptual load is high, therefore the distractors will not be perceived and distractor’s interference will be eliminated. In contrast, the distractors will be perceived when the relevant task involves low perceptual load. Many studies provided support for the perceptual load theory.However, Lavie et al.observerd increased interference from distractor letters with verbal working memory when the targets were also letters. Nevertheless, some researchers found the Stroop effect is eliminated when subjects hold verbal information in the working memory during the meaning-comparison task. Similarly, the Stroop effect is significant attenuated when spatial working memory is occupied in the arrow-word According to the model of biased competition model of visual selection, the contents of working memory can due to top-down biased selection in favour of the object whose features were preactivated from working memory. So here is the question, if we ask the subject keep visual information in working memory when they fininsh the Flanker-task, whether the distractor matched the content of working memory would capture the subjects’ attention in high perceptual load condition.In order to solve this question, we used three experiments to exam whether the content of working memory would capture attention in high perceptual load condition. In Experiment1, the paradigm was the same to previous experiment used by Forster et al.We want to make sure that in this experiment we can get the same results of Forster et al.though we take different pictures as the distractor. In Experiment2, the dual-task paradigm was adoupted, we add a working memory task on the basis of the Flanker-task. In Experiment3, in order to exclude the verbal working memory mix the reuslts, we add articulatory suppression to suppress the phonologieal loop. We found that the result of Experiment1was similar to the results of Forster et al.Accordingly, any new results from the following experiments can not be attributed to the different materials. In the Experiment2, we found that the interference from irrelevant distractor represented in working memory was not eliminated by high perceptual load. But we can’t make a conclusion that the content of working memory can guide attentional selection for the verbal working memory may play some role. In Experiment3, we found the same result of Experiment2. Accordingly, we can make a decision that the visual information representated in working memory can guide the attentional selection in high perceptual load condition. In conclusion, our new finding is that the high perceptual load cannot eliminate the distractor processing when the distractor matched the viusal information represented in working memory.