The Effect Of Working Memory To Prming Of Popout (PoP)

There’s a large amount of information in our daily life, people can ensure efficient cognitive activities only if they could selectively process the useful information to their own which need to be controled.The biased competition model (Desimone&Duncan,1995) suggests that there are two attentional control of visual selective attention:the top-down attentional control and the bottom-up attentional control(Yantis,2000).A large number of studies show that, working memory could affect our visual attention selection(Duncan&Humphreys,1989;Bundesen,1990; Wolfe,1994), even if the search target is a pop-out item(Soto, Humphreys&Heinke,2006).When the feature of the pop-out items are same in the consecutive trials, the RT of the consecutive trials will reduce, that is, priming of popout (PoP) appears. A recent study (Lee, Mozer&Vecera,2009) eliminating the role of memory representation as an explanation for the underly-ing me chanism of PoP. The current study aimed to test whether visual working mem-ory (VWM) ca n effect PoP.In experment1, the woring memory is based on the object. Experiment1is divided into two experiments:in experment la, the working memory is the color of objects; in experment1b, the working memory is the shape of objects. In experment2, the woring memory is based on the spatial location.The results show that:(1) The color of the target could cause PoP.(2) Both the irrelevant working memory and the relevat working memory can guide attrntion to the objects which are the same or similar to the working memory.(3) Only the spatial location based working memory can effect PoP.