The Influence Of The Type Of Visual Working Memory Storage Load On Selective Attention

The environment has a large number of stimuli,but cognitive resources of people for processing the information is limited.In order to lead a normal life,attentional system with limited cognitive resources effectively selects the information related to the current task to process,and inhibits the information irrelevant to the current task,this ability is called selective attention.If the processing of task-relevant information is not affected by irrelevant information,it indicated the effective selection;if the processing of task-relevant information is effected by the irrelevant information,this phenomenon is called distractor effect,which was used as a measure index of effectiveness of selective attention by many researchers.In recent years,a large number of studies show that visual working memory storage load affects selective attention.Visual working memory storage load can be divided into visual working memory capacity load and visual working memory resolution load.The effect of visual working memory capacity load on selective attention is not consistent.Some studies have found that the effect of the capacity load weakens the distractor effect(Konstantinou & Lavie,2013:Roper & Vecera,2014;Konstantinou et al.,2014),while others have found the opposite effect(Zhang & Luck,2015).The inconsistent results may be affected by the spatial location of Flanker task relative to the visual working memory task.Furthermore,the processing mechanism of visual working memory resolution load on selective attention is still unclear.Moreover,at the visual working encoding and storage stages,how different visual working memory storage loads affect selective attention ?In order to solve the above problems,this study uses Flanker task as the selective attention task and memorizing the color of squares as the visual working memory task,aiming at exploring the effects of capacity load and resolution load on selective attention at different stages by presenting the Flanker stimulus at the central position or peripheral position of the memory items.Experiment 1 explored the effects of storage load type and spatial location on selective attention at visual working memory encoding stage.Experiment 2 explored the effects of storage load type and spatial location on selective attention at visual working memory storage stage.Experiment 3 explored the effects of visual working memory load and target processing type on selective attention when the target was located at the center of the visual working memory task.Experiment 4 explored the effects of storage load type on selective attention when the target was located at the center of the visual working memory task at visual working memory storage stage.We used ERP technology to analyze the amplitude of N2 evoked by two different types of load.In general,the conclusions are as follows.At the encoding and storage stage of visual working memory,visual working memory load effected selective attention through different processing mechanisms,mainly summarized as followed: 1)at the encoding stage of visual working memory,compared with the baseline condition,the increase of visual working memory capacity load and resolution load consumes more perceptual resources,which results in the decrease of the distractor effect.The results support the theory of perceptual selection mechanism.2)at the storage of visual working memory,compared with the baseline condition,under the condition of resolution load,the distractor effect is reduced when the Flanker task is located in the memory center.However,under the condition of capacity load,the distractor effect is increased when the Flanker task is located in the memory center.The results support the theory that attention switching among space consumes attention resources.