Wills-Conn Katelyn, Schroder Hans, Moser Jason, Ravizza Susan
Michigan State University, United States.
Michigan State University, United States.
Biol Psychol. 2019 May;144:1-10. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2019.03.002. Epub 2019 Mar 8.
Stimulus-driven attention drawn to relevant items can improve working memory (WM) whether attentional capture is driven by salient, low level features or by contingent salience from shared features with targets. In the current work, we examined the time course of enhanced attention to contingently salient information in a non-spatial WM task using event related brain potentials (ERPs). In line with previous work, we predicted that the encoding of contingently salient stimuli would be associated with an enhancement of cognitive control processes rather than low-level salience detection. The results of this study supported this hypothesis, evidenced by a posterior P3 component of greater amplitude for contingently salient stimuli relative to stimuli of a control color, which is thought to reflect enhanced attention to information that matches a target held in WM. However, P3 amplitude during encoding was unrelated to subsequent memory accuracy. As an exploratory follow up on these results, we conducted a regression analysis including beliefs about ability to focus attention as a moderator, which interacted with P3 amplitude to predict WM recall of salient letters. Furthermore, source localization analyses implicated a significant contribution of regions in the salience network to the detection of target stimuli, but only frontal control regions showed a greater response to salient than control letters. Thus, the results of this experiment suggest that participants enhance cognitive control during the encoding of contingently salient stimuli, but that the relationship between this neural process during encoding and subsequent benefits to WM recall might depend on individual differences in attentional focus.
无论是由显著的低层次特征驱动，还是由与目标共享特征的偶然显著性驱动，将注意力吸引到相关项目上的刺激驱动型注意力都可以改善工作记忆（WM）。在当前的研究中，我们使用事件相关脑电位（ERP），在非空间WM任务中考察了对偶然显著信息增强注意力的时间进程。与之前的研究一致，我们预测偶然显著刺激的编码将与认知控制过程的增强相关，而不是与低层次显著性检测相关。本研究结果支持了这一假设，相对于对照颜色的刺激，偶然显著刺激的后顶叶P3成分波幅更大，这被认为反映了对与WM中所持目标相匹配信息的注意力增强。然而，编码过程中的P3波幅与随后的记忆准确性无关。作为对这些结果的探索性后续研究，我们进行了一项回归分析，将关于集中注意力能力的信念作为调节变量，该变量与P3波幅相互作用以预测显著字母的WM回忆。此外，源定位分析表明，显著性网络中的区域对目标刺激的检测有显著贡献，但只有额叶控制区域对显著字母的反应比对对照字母的反应更大。因此，本实验结果表明，参与者在偶然显著刺激的编码过程中增强了认知控制，但编码过程中的这种神经过程与随后WM回忆的益处之间的关系可能取决于注意力集中方面的个体差异。
