Effects Of Working Memory Representation Activation And Inhibition States On Attention Orientation

Humans receive a large amount of sensory information from the outside world every day,and memory systems and attention systems play a vital role in the selection and coding of information.Visual working memory is mainly responsible for cognitive processes such as processing and storage of visual information,while attention is responsible for selecting relevant information from a large amount of information into the visual working memory system.Stimuli with prominent features in the field of vision can capture visual attention preferentially in a bottom-up manner,and stimuli sharing features with items in the memory system can also direct visual attention in a top-down manner.The study found that when the information in memory cannot be the search target,the interference stimulus of memory matching can still guide visual attention.But when visual search is slow,people can actively stay away from the matching stimulus,and cognitive control plays an important role in this process.Based on previous theories,this study further studies the time course of cognitive control in working memory representation guided attention in different activated states.In this study,the two-task paradigm was adopted to manipulate working memory representation state through directed forgetting task,From the perspective of cognitive control,two variables,perceptual load and SOA,are introduced to explore the impact of working memory representation on attention orientation.Experiment 1 investigated the influence of perceptual load on the representation of working memory to guide attention when VWM is activated in different states.It was found that under high load condition,the activated working memory representation could suppress visual attention,while under low load condition,the activated working memory representation could suppress the interference term of visual attention.The suppressed interference items are not affected by the perceptual load and have no effect on visual attention direction.Experiment 2 investigated the influence of SOA on the representation of working memory to guide attention at different VWM activation states.The results showed that for a long time in SOA,the activated working memory representation could suppress visual attention,while the suppressed working memory table had no effect on attention orientation.In the short term,both active and suppressed working memory items can actively direct visual attention.Based on previous theories,this study further studies the time course of cognitive control in working memory representation guided attention in different activated states.The research conclusions are as follows: 1.Under the condition of high perceptual load,the working memory representation items in high activated state can promote the subsequent task search,while under the condition of low perceptual load,the working memory representation items in high activated state can inhibit the subsequent task search.2.Under the condition of long SOA,the working memory representation project in high activated state can promote the subsequent task search,while under the condition of short SOA,the working memory representation project in high activated state can inhibit the subsequent task search.