Dowd Emma Wu, Nag Samoni, Golomb Julie D
Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University.
Vis cogn. 2019;27(9-10):714-731. doi: 10.1080/13506285.2019.1659895. Epub 2019 Sep 5.
The contents of working memory (WM) can influence where we attend-but can it also interfere with what we see? Active maintenance of visual items in WM biases attention towards WM-matching objects, and also enhances early perceptual processing of WM-matching items (e.g., more accurate perceptual discrimination). Here, we asked whether a WM-matching distractor with perceptual processing of a target's features. In a dual-task paradigm, participants maintained a shape in WM across an intervening visual search task, during which they had to reproduce the colour of a designated target item using a continuous-report technique. Importantly, the WM shape could match the target item, a distractor item, or no item in the search array. When the WM shape matched a distractor, we found no evidence of systematic perceptual interference (i.e., swapping or mixing with the distractor colour), but observed only general disruptions in target processing (i.e., decreased target accuracy). These results suggest that when visual attention is inadvertently drawn to a WM-matching distractor, any resultant automatic perceptual processing may be too transient or weak to significantly interfere with perceptual processing of the target's features.
工作记忆（WM）的内容会影响我们的注意力指向——但它也会干扰我们所看到的东西吗？在工作记忆中对视觉项目进行主动维持，会使注意力偏向与工作记忆匹配的物体，并且还会增强对与工作记忆匹配项目的早期感知处理（例如，更准确的感知辨别）。在此，我们探讨与目标特征的感知处理相关的工作记忆匹配干扰项是否会产生影响。在一个双任务范式中，参与者在一个中间的视觉搜索任务期间在工作记忆中维持一个形状，在此期间他们必须使用连续报告技术再现指定目标项目的颜色。重要的是，工作记忆中的形状可以与目标项目、干扰项或搜索阵列中的任何项目都不匹配。当工作记忆中的形状与一个干扰项匹配时，我们没有发现系统性感知干扰的证据（即与干扰项颜色进行交换或混合），而只观察到目标处理方面的一般性干扰（即目标准确性降低）。这些结果表明，当视觉注意力被不经意地吸引到与工作记忆匹配的干扰项上时，任何由此产生的自动感知处理可能过于短暂或微弱，以至于无法显著干扰对目标特征的感知处理。
