Won Bo-Yeong, Jiang Yuhong V
Department of Psychology.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2015 May;41(3):787-806. doi: 10.1037/xlm0000040. Epub 2014 Nov 17.
Recent empirical and theoretical work has depicted a close relationship between visual attention and visual working memory. For example, rehearsal in spatial working memory depends on spatial attention, whereas adding a secondary spatial working memory task impairs attentional deployment in visual search. These findings have led to the proposal that working memory is attention directed toward internal representations. Here, we show that the close relationship between these 2 constructs is limited to some but not all forms of spatial attention. In 5 experiments, participants held color arrays, dot locations, or a sequence of dots in working memory. During the memory retention interval, they performed a T-among-L visual search task. Crucially, the probable target location was cued either implicitly through location probability learning or explicitly with a central arrow or verbal instruction. Our results showed that whereas imposing a visual working memory load diminished the effectiveness of explicit cuing, it did not interfere with probability cuing. We conclude that spatial working memory shares similar mechanisms with explicit, goal-driven attention but is dissociated from implicitly learned attention.
近期的实证研究和理论研究表明，视觉注意力与视觉工作记忆之间存在密切关系。例如，空间工作记忆中的复述依赖于空间注意力，而增加一项次要的空间工作记忆任务会损害视觉搜索中的注意力分配。这些发现促使人们提出，工作记忆是指向内部表征的注意力。在此，我们表明这两种结构之间的密切关系仅限于某些而非所有形式的空间注意力。在5项实验中，参与者在工作记忆中保留颜色阵列、点的位置或一系列点。在记忆保持间隔期间，他们执行了“T 中找 L”视觉搜索任务。至关重要的是，可能的目标位置通过位置概率学习被隐式提示，或者通过中央箭头或言语指令被明确提示。我们的结果表明，虽然施加视觉工作记忆负荷会降低明确提示的有效性，但它不会干扰概率提示。我们得出结论，空间工作记忆与明确的、目标驱动的注意力具有相似的机制，但与隐式学习的注意力相分离。
