Influence Of Different Types Of Attention On Visual Working Memory Representation

Visual working memory(VWM)can temporarily store and process visual information while that attention has the function of filtering and selecting visual information.Research on attention and VWM has always been a concern.However,in previous studies,researchers focused on the positive attention guidance bias in VWM representations and the influence of the content of VWM on the attention selection process in visual tasks(Bundesen,1990;Desimone &;Duncan,1995;Navalpakkam & amp;Itti,2005;Wolfe,1994).These study found that the content of VWM can guide attention and affect the process of attention selection,and at the same time,the attention selection can affect the representation of VWM as well.But the internal mechanism of the influence of attention guiding on VWM representations is not yet clear.Does negative attention have an effect on the characterization of VWM compared to positive attention? Are the effects of the two types of attention on VWM representations based on the same intrinsic mechanism?We conducted three experiments to explore the effects of different types of attention on VWM representation and its possible mechanism.In Experiment 1,target memory rerecognition paradigm was used to explore the influence of different types of attention guidance on VWM representation in coding stage when the cues were pointed to a single project.Experiment 2 was exactly the same with experiment 1 and the only difference was that the number of projects cues pointing to were changedfrom 1 to 2and 3;Experimental 3 discusses the mechanism of different types of attention guidance affecting the representation of VWM using the Event related potential technology to analyze the changes in the amplitude of N1 and P2 induced by different types of attention conditions at the cue stage and memory stage,aiming to explore the neural differences between the different types of attention guidance affecting the VWM representation.It was found that both positive and negative attention promoted the representation of high priority projects in VWM,and attention promotion effect was observed.However,the attention promotion effect under the positive attention guiding conditions was stronger.Compared with the negative cue conditions and baseline conditions without attention guidance,the positive attention guidance conditions have induced greater P2 and N1 waves at the early attention cue presentation stage and memory stage,respectively.The P2 and N1 amplitude under negative attention guidance conditions was also larger than the base line conditions.In general,the conclusions of the study are as follows.1.Under both conditions of positive and negative attention,the representation of high priority items of attention are enhanced in the VWM.2.Positive attention guidance is more effective than negative attention guidance in VWM.3.There is a difference in the underlying mechanism between the positive andnegative attention while the establishment of the "related template" under the positive attention guidance condition is more efficient than the "rejection template" under the negative attention guidance condition.