Center for Cognition and Sociality, Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Expo-ro 55, Daejeon, 34126, Korea.
Department of Psychology, Chungnam National University, Daehak-ro 99, Daejeon, 34134, Korea.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2021 Aug;28(4):1261-1269. doi: 10.3758/s13423-021-01898-w. Epub 2021 Mar 22.
Theories of attention postulate the existence of an attentional template containing target features in working or long-term memory. Previous research has shown that these internal representations of target features in memory are shifted away from nontarget features and that attention is tuned to the shifted feature especially when the target appeared with similar nontarget items. While previous studies have shown that the target-nontarget relationship has influence on the attentional selection and the representation shift when attentional template is maintained in long-term memory, there is little evidence for such effects when attentional template is stored in working memory. To address this issue, we asked participants to search for a target, which varied from trial to trial (working memory attentional template), or look for the target being stable across trials (long-term memory attentional template). We found that the shifted target features captured attention and that the representations of target features were deviated away from nontarget features when the target template was stored in either working memory or long-term memory. However, such effects were found to be greater for the attentional template in long-term memory. The present results provide evidence that one can encode the target-nontarget relationship even though the target varies from trial to trial, and such contextual information influences attentional selection and target representation shift even under this dynamically changing environment.
注意理论假设在工作记忆或长期记忆中存在包含目标特征的注意模板。先前的研究表明,记忆中目标特征的这些内部表示会从非目标特征中偏移,并且当目标与类似的非目标项目一起出现时,注意力会被调整到偏移的特征上。虽然先前的研究表明,当注意模板在长期记忆中保持时,目标-非目标关系会影响注意力选择和表示偏移,但当注意模板存储在工作记忆中时,几乎没有证据表明存在这种影响。为了解决这个问题,我们要求参与者搜索目标,目标在每次试验中都发生变化(工作记忆注意模板),或者寻找在试验中保持稳定的目标(长期记忆注意模板)。我们发现,当目标模板存储在工作记忆或长期记忆中时,偏移的目标特征会吸引注意力,并且目标特征的表示会偏离非目标特征。然而,这种效应在长期记忆中的注意模板中更为明显。本研究结果提供了证据表明,即使目标在每次试验中都发生变化,人们也可以编码目标-非目标关系,并且这种上下文信息会影响注意力选择和目标表示偏移,即使在这种动态变化的环境下也是如此。