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Automatic selection of irrelevant object features through working memory: evidence for top-down attentional capture
1Division of Neuroscience and Mental Health, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, London W6 8RP, UK. d.soto@imperial.ac.uk
Experimental Psychology
|March 18, 2009
Summary
Working memory (WM) guides attention in visual search. When distractor objects match both shape and color of a memory cue, search performance is impaired, suggesting WM guidance is attribute-specific.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Visual Perception
Background:
- Working memory (WM) content influences attentional deployment during visual search.
- Previous studies suggest WM can guide attention, but the specificity of this guidance is debated.
Purpose of the Study:
- To determine if working memory (WM) guidance in visual search is based on all item attributes or only task-relevant ones.
- To investigate the interaction between memory-based attention and visual selection processes.
Main Methods:
- Participants memorized the shape of a colored object.
- Participants then performed a visual search for a target line among distractors, where distractors were embedded in objects.
- Distractor objects varied in their match to the memorized shape, color, or both, relative to a neutral baseline.
Main Results:
- Search performance was significantly impaired when a distractor object matched both the shape and color of the memorized cue.
- This impairment occurred even when the matching distractor object did not contain the target.
Conclusions:
- Working memory (WM) guidance of attention in visual search is not solely based on task-relevant attributes.
- Attentional selection is influenced by multiple attributes held in WM, even when only one attribute is task-relevant.
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