The Effects Of Attention Way On The Processes Of Inhibiting Distractors During Working Memory

The resource of working memory is extremely limited.It is necessary to selectively maintain relevant information and inhibit interference from distracting information.Previous studies have found that attention control of visual sensory processing predicts working memory performance.Present study adopted a series of continuous report task to examine how different types of attention affect sensory processing and then influence the processes of inhibiting distractors during working memory.Experiment one adopted an independent perceptual task and a variant version of continuous report task to examine the effect of interference on WM capacity as well as precision.We are interested in whether the precision of perceptual representation would influence the ability to inhibit interference during working memory processing.The results found that when participants were required to maintain items below their capacity,distractor reduced the precision of working memory representation.When the memory load beyond their capacity,distractor reduced the number of items stored in working memory.Experiment two utilized two kinds of spatial attention,overt attention and covert attention,during memory encoding to examine the effects of attention types on the processes of inhibiting distractors during memory encoding.The results found that overt attention had an advantage over covert attention on memory precision when there were no distractors and the number of fixation in target correlated with precision of working memory positively.There were difference between attention types on memory performance when confronted with distractor and the pupil size were also affected by the interference during the maintenance phase.Experiment three presented effective cue about target and distractor before stimuli sample and recorded brain activity using electroencephalography to explore whether predictive cues of different attention types influence the processes of inhibiting distractors during working memory,as well as the underlying neural mechanisms.The results found that both cues of attention types could facilitate working memory performance and suppress interference effectively.Overt attention had an advantage over covert attention on memory precision under high working memory load,which could be reflected through P1 and N2pc event-related potential components during perceptual processing.These results suggest that attention types can influence the processes of inhibiting distractors during working memory,potentially through facilitating sensory processing.During working memory processing,searching valid cues in environment and choosing appropriate attention way can improve the quality of perceptual representation and then enhance the ability of inhibiting inference.The present study provides a theoretical guidance for how to store more items with high quality in working memory,and how to improve the efficiency of cognitive processing in practice.