Sun Sol Z, Shen Jenny, Shaw Mark, Cant Jonathan S, Ferber Susanne
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5S 3G3,
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2015 Aug;77(6):1841-7. doi: 10.3758/s13414-015-0918-1.
Many theories of attention propose that the contents of working memory (WM) can act as an attentional template, which biases processing in favor of perceptually similar inputs. While support has been found for this claim, it is unclear how attentional templates are generated when searching real-world environments. We hypothesized that in naturalistic settings, attentional templates are commonly generated from conceptual knowledge, an idea consistent with sensorimotor models of knowledge representation. Participants performed a visual search task in the delay period of a WM task, where the item in memory was either a colored disk or a word associated with a color concept (e.g., "Rose," associated with red). During search, we manipulated whether a singleton distractor in the array matched the contents of WM. Overall, we found that search times were impaired in the presence of a memory-matching distractor. Furthermore, the degree of impairment did not differ based on the contents of WM. Put differently, regardless of whether participants were maintaining a perceptually colored disk identical to the singleton distractor, or whether they were simply maintaining a word associated with the color of the distractor, the magnitude of attentional capture was the same. Our results suggest that attentional templates can be generated from conceptual knowledge, in the physical absence of the visual feature.
许多注意力理论认为，工作记忆（WM）的内容可以充当注意力模板，使加工过程偏向于感知上相似的输入。虽然这一观点已得到支持，但在搜索现实世界环境时，注意力模板是如何生成的尚不清楚。我们假设，在自然环境中，注意力模板通常由概念性知识生成，这一观点与知识表征的感觉运动模型一致。参与者在WM任务的延迟期执行视觉搜索任务，记忆中的项目要么是彩色圆盘，要么是与颜色概念相关的单词（例如，与红色相关的“玫瑰”）。在搜索过程中，我们操纵数组中的单一干扰项是否与WM的内容匹配。总体而言，我们发现，在存在记忆匹配干扰项的情况下，搜索时间会受到影响。此外，受影响的程度不会因WM的内容而有所不同。换句话说，无论参与者是在维持一个与单一干扰项相同的感知彩色圆盘，还是仅仅在维持一个与干扰项颜色相关的单词，注意力捕获的程度都是相同的。我们的结果表明，在视觉特征实际不存在的情况下，注意力模板可以由概念性知识生成。
