The Effect Of Exogenous Attention On Visual Working Memory

In the visual processing system,the visual working memory(VWM)plays a significant role in the storage of the visual information and the real-timeprocessing.In recent years,along with the visual working memory more and more attention,researchers have done a lot of research results in the aspects of visual working memory capacity and visual memorystorage mechanism.The researchers pay more attention to the problem of the storage mechanism about the visual working memory.There are three basic models of visual working memory storage for the storage mechanism : classic slot model,flexible resource model and "slot+average" model.Slots+averaging model's supporters verified this model under the context that endogenous attention,but they ignored exogenous attention.In fact,exogenous attention is a processing of bottom-up that not easily being influenced by self factors,so exogenous attention can be better and more effective as experimental material.The present study aimed to explore whether exogenous attention could affect the memory precision and guess rate when individuals just need to remember one item.The study includes two parts: each part adopts a change detection taskand a recall task.The first part investigates the effect on the visual working memory of the exogenous attention under the condition of short coding time.The experimental results show that(1)exogenous attention has no effect on the precision of a single item of VWM under the condition of short coding time,(2)exogenous attention impacts guess rate under the condition of short coding time,the guess rate in inconsistent condition is larger than that in no cue and consistent condition.These results reject the flexible resource model and provide the new evidences for the classic slot model and the "slot+average" model.The second part investigates the effect on the visual working memory of the exogenous attention under the condition of long coding time.The experimental results show that(1)exogenous attention has no effect on the guess rate of a single item of VWM under the condition of long coding time,(2)exogenous attention impacts precision under the condition of long coding time,the precision in consistent condition is higher than that in no cue and inconsistent condition.These results reject the classic slot model and provide the newevidences for the "slot+average" model.For the two-part study of behavioral experiment,it finds that the exogenous attention has different effect on visual working memory under the different coding-time conditions;and visual working memory storage mechanism is the slot+average model.