The Effect Of Semantic-match Of Working Memory Contents On Attention Capture

Attention was aimed to select relevant information,and ignore irrelevant distractions.The researches have showed that information held in working memory(WM)can guide or capture attention during visual search in a relatively automatic way even when it is irrelevant and detrimental to current task performance.However,the previous researches have mainly focus on the perceptual-match between WM content and visual search,rather than semantic-match.But there is also evidence showing that selective attention is influenced by semantic representation and task context.Therefore,it is necessary to study whether the automatical attention effect could also be moderated by the semantic-match or semantic-relationship between the content of WM and a distraction in search display.Some researchers have proposed that the semantic-match between the content of WM and a distraction can also capture attention as well as perceptual-match.In contrast,others tend to believe that the semantic-match representations do not capture attention.Moreover,the attention capture effect of semantic-match representation between WM content and distraction focuses on the field of verbal working memory(VWM),so the semantic-match representation in visual working memory whether can automatically capture attention?Secondly,WM contains the visual WM and verbal WM,the automatic influence of visual WM on visual selection in search can be demonstrated,but the conclusion that whether the content of verbal WM could automatically capture attention remains controversial.So there is a necessary to research the effect in verbal WM.Last but not lest,if the different forms of representation in WM can automatically capture attention,how the attention was captured by WM representation.In other words,does the capture effect occurred in the early stage of visual attention or late stage?The present research included three experiments to solve the above problems from visual working memory and verbal working memory.WM and visual search dual-task paradigm was employed in each experiment.Each trial began with a fixation display for 500 ms,followed by the memory item for 500 ms,and then the search display for 3000 ms,which followed 500 ms after the offset of the memory item.Participants were instructed to memorize the visual or verbal prime and to discriminate the orientation(up or bottom)of the target,and were directly told that“the memory item is always different from the search target”.In Experiment 1,the memory item could be a visual colored square,the color of the square could be red,green,blue and yellow,such as red square.The aim was to test whether semantic-match item could capture attention in visual WM field.The participants were asked to said something(such as 1/2/3)rather than the color word to avoid verbal coding.The results showed that visual search RTs were slower in matching trials in comparison of control trials,suggesting memory-match items had capture attention no matter the perceptual-match trials or semantic-match trials.At the same time,the shortest time also appeared the attention capture effect,suggesting the effect could be occurred in the early stage of visual attention.In Experiment 2,the memory item could be a visually presented verbal Chinese character that mean the color,the color of the square also could be red,green,blue and yellow,such as “?”.The participants were asked to verbalize the word to avoid potential problem.These operation were used to test whether verbal WM could guide attention,and the semantic-match item could capture attention in verbal WM field.Results showed that the visual search RT was longer in perceptual-match trials or semantic-match trials,than control trials,suggested that visually presented verbal WM(vis-VWM)content could capture attention,and the semantic item match with vis-VWM could capture attention.In Experiment 3,the memory item could be a aurally presented verbal Chinese character,and others were the same with the Experiment 2 except the verbalization.Results showed that the visual search RT was longer in control trials and perceptual-match trials,than the semantic-match trials,but in the shortest RT,semantic-match trials was longer than control trials,suggested that aurally presented verbal WM(aud-VWM)content could not capture attention,in contrast,appeared the attention reject effect,but the semantic-match item could capture attention in early stage of attention search.In conclusion,this study confirmed that the content of working memory(contain visual WM and visually verbal WM)and semantic-matching representation could capture attention,and proved that the hypothesis that attention capture effect occurred in the early stages of attention.In addition,the attention reject effect due to the channel specificity and cross-modal inhibitory could suggest that biased competition model only applies to a single channel,but not cross-modal.