Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, 143 Ames Hall, 3400 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD, 21218, USA.
The Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine, Inc, Bethesda, MD, USA.
Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2019 Apr;19(2):253-267. doi: 10.3758/s13415-018-00663-2.
Attention and working memory (WM) have previously been shown to interact closely when sensory information is being maintained. However, when non-sensory information is maintained in WM, the relationship between WM and sensory attention may be less strong. In the current study, we used electroencephalography to evaluate whether value-driven attentional capture (i.e., allocation of attention to a task-irrelevant feature previously associated with a reward) and its effects on either sensory or non-sensory WM performance might be greater than the effects of salient, non-reward-associated stimuli. In a training phase, 19 participants learned to associate a color with reward. Then, participants were presented with squares and encoded their locations into WM. Participants were instructed to convert the spatial locations either to another type of sensory representation or to an abstract, relational type of representation. During the WM delay period, task-irrelevant distractors, either previously-rewarded or non-rewarded, were presented, with a novel color distractor in the other hemifield. The results revealed lower alpha power and larger N2pc amplitude over posterior electrode sides contralateral to the previously rewarded color, compared to ipsilateral. These effects were mainly found during relational WM, compared to sensory WM, and only for the previously rewarded distractor color, compared to a previous non-rewarded target color or novel color. These effects were associated with modulations of WM performance. These results appear to reflect less capture of attention during maintenance of specific location information, and suggest that value-driven attentional capture can be mitigated as a function of the type of information maintained in WM.
注意和工作记忆 (WM) 在保持感官信息时曾被证明密切相关。然而，当非感官信息在 WM 中保持时，WM 和感官注意之间的关系可能不太强。在当前的研究中，我们使用脑电图来评估价值驱动的注意捕获（即，将注意力分配到与奖励相关的任务无关的特征上）及其对感官或非感官 WM 表现的影响是否大于显著的、与奖励无关的刺激的影响。在训练阶段，19 名参与者学习将颜色与奖励相关联。然后，参与者呈现正方形并将其位置编码到 WM 中。参与者被指示将空间位置转换为另一种类型的感官表示或抽象的、关系类型的表示。在 WM 延迟期间，呈现与任务无关的分心物，无论是先前奖励的还是非奖励的，在另一个视野中呈现新的颜色分心物。结果表明，与同侧相比，先前奖励的颜色对侧的后电极侧的 alpha 功率较低，N2pc 振幅较大。这些影响主要在关系 WM 中发现，与感官 WM 相比，并且仅在前奖励的分心物颜色上，与先前非奖励的目标颜色或新颜色相比。这些效应与 WM 性能的调节有关。这些结果似乎反映了在特定位置信息保持期间注意力的捕获较少，并表明价值驱动的注意捕获可以随着 WM 中保持的信息类型而减轻。
