Attentional Capture By Entirely Irrelevant Stimuli Driven By Working Memory

In recent years,the research on the interaction between working memory and visual attention has become a hot field in cognitive psychology.A large number of experiments provide strong evidence for the guiding role of working memory content in selective visual attention.Working memory content is considered to play an important role in the top-down attention control.However,in the past studies,there is a dispute about whether the content of working memory can automatically guide attention.It is difficult to answer whether working memory content can automatically lead attention to the stimulus that is completely irrelevant to the current task because memory matching stimuli in the past research paradigm are associated with current tasks in different ways.In this study,we modified the previous dual-task paradigm consisting of a visual search task embedded in the delay period of a working-memory task,presenting a distractor stimulus on the periphery of the search array,and presenting memory test only in some trials.Because the interference stimulus is completely irrelevant to the current task,it can effectively preclude the motivation of the subjects to voluntarily attend the stimulus.The present study included four experiments.We have shown that the stimulus which is completely irrelevant to the task can automatically capture attention.The results showed a significant attentional capture effect in Experiments 1 without speed-accuracy trade-off.It suggested that the entirely irrelevant stimuli driven by working memory can capture attention.Moreover,this difference did not approach significance in Experiment 2,suggesting that the results from Experiment 1 was not perceptual priming effect.We precluded the possibility of eye movements to the distractor before completion of the search task in Experiment 3.The Experiment 4 was used to test whether verbal working memory could also drive entirely irrelevant stimulus capture attention.Here,the author demonstrated that working memory can drive entirely irrelevant stimuli capture attention and this effect is not due to perceptual priming or the eye movements to the distractor before completion of the search task.