The Working Memory Stroop Effect

There is a complex relationship between the working memory and attention.In recent years,working memory has been described as internally directed attention which implies that the working memory contents should affect behaviors exactly like an externally perceived and attended stimulus.Here,internal attention refers to attention which operates over representations of items that are no longer present in the environment.Here,researchers have used the dual-task paradigm that was combined with the working memory task and the color discrimination task.The goal was to research the relationship between the working memory and attention.The results tell us that the semantic information about the clue that maintained in the working memory can interfere the discrimination of the color which is present in front of your eyes.It gives a prof for the theory that the working memory is a kind of attention which can operating over representations of item that are no longer present in the environment.But we still don’t know which one plays an important role in the working memory stroop effect,is the depth of processing in the encoding stage or the maintenance of information? In these studies,the experiments have used the improved working memory stroop effect paradigm to explore the importance of the depth of processing in the encoding stage and the maintenances of information.There are three parts in this study.In the first study,the stroop effect is still significant in the improved working memory stroop effect paradigm.Later,there was an experiment to exclude the effect of priming effect in the first experiment.In the third experiment,the depth of processing in the encoding stage was the same as that in the first experiment which was used to study the working memory stroop effect,but the results tell us that the effect is similar than the working memory stroop effect and the efficiency of working memory is also declined.The study one do proves that the working memory and attention share the same cognitive resources,so they should fight for resources.The efficiency of the information’s maintenances will be reduced when more resources are used to overcome the conflicts.In the second study,it was found that the stroop effect and the efficiency of working memory didn’t change asthe time flied in the maintenance stage of working memory.The results indicate that the representation’s strength of the information which was maintained in the working memory will not change as the time goes.In the third study,there were two measures to ensure the unseen stimulus unconscious to the subjects.There was no unconscious working memory stroop effect here.But the accuracy of the subjects’ working memory probe test was higher than the chance level.But there was a possibility that the subjects will use the color of the patch to complete the memory probe test when the subjects didn’t realize the stimulus of the working memory clue,hence,the accuracy of the memory probe test will higher than the chance level when the color of the patch is compatible with the working memory clue’s means.Maybe,the paradigm of this research is not suitable for the exploring of the unconscious working memory stroop effect.