The Effect Of Reward And Punishment On Attentional Guidance From Working Memory Representation

The contents of visual working memory(VWM)can not only guide attention to target similar to WM representation,but also bias attention toward distractors matched with it,this is attentional guidance from WM representation.However,whether the cognitive control could modulate the process of attentional guidance was controversial yet.Some studies have found that attentional guidance was automatic process that is stable in the early stages of visual search.Other studies have found that attentional guidance was influenced by cognitive control and was a flexible and controllable process.Therefore,this study,combined the reward and punishment and dual-task paradigm(WM and visual search),aimed to investigate whether cognitive control can reject or inhibit attentional guidance from WM representation.Most critically,all participants were informed that the VWM item could never reappear as target in visual search task at the beginning of the experiment,so that they could adopt the ?rejecting? or ?inhibiting? attentional set to bias attention away towards such distractor.Study 1 has used training-test paradigm to examine the impact of penalty association stimulus on the attentional guidance from WM representation.In the training session,items were associated with penalty value.In the test session,a classical dual-task paradigm combining WM and attention capture was used.The results showed that the first fixation duration of matching items associated with high penalty value was short than un-matching item significantly.It suggested that penalty association improves cognitive control to facilitates attentional disengagement.Study 2 and study 3 has used dual-task paradigm combined WM task and visual search task.Reward and punishment feedback was given in the early visual search stage or in the reaction stage to induce the approaching and avoidance motivation.The results was that approaching and avoidance motivation improve cognitive control ability to rejected the attentional guidance from the irrelevant WM representation.It suggested that the attentional guidance from the WM representation was not automatic process in the early stage of visual processing.To sum up: When the WM items was associated with loss of money,penalty association improves cognitive control to accelerate attentional disengagement.The approaching and avoidance motivation can improve the cognitive control ability to reject the irrelevant WM representation immediately,the attentional guidance was disappearing.