The interaction of internal and external attention

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Attention Research

Background:

• The internal/external framework posits attention to internal and external stimuli are similar.
• External attention research explores attentional breadth (narrowing/broadening), but internal attention's breadth is less understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if internal attention can be narrowed or broadened, similar to external attention.
• To examine how manipulating internal and external attention breadth affects distractor processing.

Main Methods:

• Participants encoded working memory arrays with varying internal breadth (broad/narrow).
• An Eriksen flanker task with varying external breadth (broad/narrow) was performed during memory maintenance.
• A memory test followed to assess recall of a random item.

Main Results:

• Flanker congruency effects were unaffected by internal attention breadth relative to external distractors.
• An exception occurred when internal breadth was retrocued, increasing congruency effects for aligned flankers.
• External distractor processing appears independent of internal attention breadth until internal cuing.

Conclusions:

• Internal attention breadth does not modulate external distractor processing until after encoding and internal cuing.
• Findings suggest limitations in the current internal/external attention framework.
• The interaction between internal representations and external stimuli processing is more complex than previously assumed.