Department of Psychology, Research Center for Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Soochow University, Suzhou, People's Republic of China.
School of Psychology, Liaoning Collaborative Innovation Center of Children and Adolescents Healthy Personality Assessment and Cultivation, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, China.
Mem Cognit. 2024 Jul;52(5):1065-1078. doi: 10.3758/s13421-024-01521-y. Epub 2024 Feb 2.
Although previous studies have well established that audiovisual enhancement has a promoting effect on working memory and selective attention, there remains an open question about the influence of audiovisual enhancement on attentional guidance by working memory. To address this issue, the present study adopted a dual-task paradigm that combines a working memory task and a visual search task, in which the content of working memory was presented in audiovisual or visual modalities. Given the importance of search speed in memory-driven attentional suppression, we divided participants into two groups based on their reaction time (RT) in neutral trials and examined whether audiovisual enhancement in attentional suppression was modulated by search speed. The results showed that the slow search group exhibited a robust memory-driven attentional suppression effect, and the suppression effect started earlier and its magnitude was greater in the audiovisual condition than in the visual-only condition. However, among the faster search group, the suppression effect only occurred in the trials with longer RTs in the visual-only condition, and its temporal dynamics were selectively improved in the audiovisual condition. Furthermore, audiovisual enhancement of memory-driven attention evolved over time. These findings suggest that semantically congruent bimodal presentation can progressively facilitate the strength and temporal dynamics of memory-driven attentional suppression, and that search speed plays an important role in this process. This may be due to a synergistic effect between multisensory working memory representation and top-down suppression mechanism. The present study demonstrates the flexible role of audiovisual enhancement on cognitive control over memory-driven attention.
尽管先前的研究已经充分证实了视听增强对工作记忆和选择性注意具有促进作用，但关于视听增强对工作记忆引导注意的影响仍存在一个悬而未决的问题。为了解决这个问题，本研究采用了一种双重任务范式，该范式结合了工作记忆任务和视觉搜索任务，其中工作记忆的内容以视听或视觉方式呈现。鉴于搜索速度在记忆驱动的注意抑制中的重要性，我们根据参与者在中性试验中的反应时间 (RT) 将他们分为两组，并检查了注意抑制中的视听增强是否受到搜索速度的调节。结果表明，慢搜索组表现出强大的记忆驱动的注意抑制效应，并且在视听条件下，抑制效应开始更早，幅度更大，而在仅视觉条件下则更小。然而，在较快的搜索组中，仅在视觉条件下的 RT 较长的试验中才会出现抑制效应，并且其时间动态选择性地在视听条件下得到改善。此外，记忆驱动的注意力的视听增强是随时间演变的。这些发现表明，语义上一致的双模呈现可以逐渐增强记忆驱动的注意抑制的强度和时间动态，并且搜索速度在这个过程中起着重要作用。这可能是由于多感觉工作记忆表示和自上而下的抑制机制之间的协同作用所致。本研究展示了视听增强对记忆驱动的注意力的认知控制的灵活作用。
