工作记忆内容驱动完全无关刺激捕获注意

Attentional Capture by Entirely Irrelevant Stimuli Driven by the Contents of Working Memory

研究通过三个实验以检验工作记忆内容能否自动引导注意选择视场中与之匹配的任务完全无关刺激.实验一要求被试在工作记忆保持阶段完成一个视觉搜索任务,结果发现当搜索序列外的无关干扰刺激与工作记忆内容匹配时搜索绩效显著降低;实验二结果表明该干扰效应不能归因于自下而上的启动机制,因为对颜色刺激仅仅进行知觉辨认而没有工作记忆加工时并没有产生启动效应;实验三通过缩短搜索任务刺激的呈现时间以使得被试在完成搜索任务前没有足够时间眼跳至无关干扰刺激,结果发现了与实验一类似的干扰效应,说明在没有眼跳的情况下与工作记忆内容匹配的完全无关刺激可以捕获注意.这些结果表明保持在工作记忆中的信息表征可以自动引导注意选择视场中与之匹配的任务完全无关刺激,为基于工作记忆内容的注意捕获提供了新证据支持.

The purpose of the present study was to use a new distractor paradigm to establish the effect of attentional capture by entirely irrelevant stimuli that match the contents of working memory. In Experiment 1,participants were asked to perform a visual search task during working memory maintenance. The results showed slower search performance when the irrelevant distractor in the periphery matched the contents of working memory compared to when it did not. Experiment 2 was designed to discard a bottom-up priming account,and the results showed that the disruptive effects disappeared when the cue was merely perceptually identified without working memory processing. This suggests that the disruptive effects were due specifically to the mechanism of top-down modulation during working memory maintenance. In Experiment 3,the interference effects persisted in the condition where the search stimuli were presented so briefly that any eye movements to the irrelevant distractor can be precluded before completion of the search task. These findings suggest that the presence of an irrelevant distractor matching working memory contents has distracted attention from focusing on the task. Because the memory-matching distractor was entirely irrelevant to the current tasks,the present results provide strong evidence for automatic guidance of attention from the contents of working memory.