Pan Yi
Department of Psychology, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, People's Republic of China.
Can J Exp Psychol. 2010 Jun;64(2):124-8. doi: 10.1037/a0019109.
There has been controversy on whether working memory (WM) contents automatically guide attention. The present study tried to replicate the effect of WM-based attentional capture using an adaption of Downing's (2000) paradigm, in which WM and attentional capture were combined. Subjects were presented with an attention display containing two objects, one of which could be precued by a matching item being held in WM. As measured by a probe discrimination task, the memory-matching object had a privileged status to capture attention regardless of the stimulus onset asynchronies between the memory cue and the attention display, even when there was absolutely no benefit for subjects to bias attention in favour of the memory match. These results suggest that WM contents guide attention in an involuntary manner. The implications of current findings for understanding of WM effects on visual selection are discussed.
工作记忆（WM）的内容是否会自动引导注意力一直存在争议。本研究试图通过改编唐宁（2000）的范式来复制基于工作记忆的注意捕获效应，该范式将工作记忆和注意捕获结合在一起。向受试者呈现一个包含两个物体的注意力显示，其中一个物体可以通过工作记忆中持有的匹配项进行预提示。通过探测辨别任务测量发现，记忆匹配的物体具有优先捕获注意力的地位，无论记忆线索与注意力显示之间的刺激起始异步如何，即使对受试者来说偏向于记忆匹配并无任何益处。这些结果表明，工作记忆内容以一种非自愿的方式引导注意力。本文讨论了当前研究结果对理解工作记忆对视觉选择影响的意义。
