No role for activated long-term memory in attentional control settings.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Visual spatial attentional capture is influenced by attentional control settings.
• Observers can form attentional control settings using long-term memory (LTM) representations.
• The precise mechanism by which LTM representations influence attentional capture remains unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

• To test the "activated LTM account" which posits that LTM representations form attentional control sets only if they are in activated LTM.
• To investigate the relationship between activated LTM and attentional control settings in visual attention.
• To determine if activated LTM representations guide attentional capture.

Main Methods:

• Combined a working memory task to assess activated LTM with a spatial blink task to evaluate attentional control settings.
• Experimentally manipulated the activation state of LTM representations.
• Measured intrusion effects and attentional capture effects.

Main Results:

• Inducing activated LTM did not lead to the formation of attentional control sets in Experiments 1 and 2.
• Experiment 3 revealed a dissociation: activated LTM objects showed greater intrusion but less capture than attentional control set objects.
• Results did not support the activated LTM account.

Conclusions:

• Representation in activated LTM is not the determining factor for LTM representations forming attentional control sets.
• Findings challenge the activated LTM account of attentional control.
• Implications for attentional templates and visual search theories require re-evaluation.