Psychological Development and Education ›› 2019, Vol. 35 ›› Issue (5): 522-529.doi: 10.16187/j.cnki.issn1001-4918.2019.05.02

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Attentional Capture by Entirely Irrelevant Stimuli Driven by the Contents of Working Memory

PAN Yi, ZHANG Lin   

  1. Department of Psychology, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou 311121
  • Published:2019-09-30

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Abstract: The purpose of the present study was to use a new distractor paradigm to establish the effect of attentional capture by entirely irrelevant stimuli that match the contents of working memory. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to perform a visual search task during working memory maintenance. The results showed slower search performance when the irrelevant distractor in the periphery matched the contents of working memory compared to when it did not. Experiment 2 was designed to discard a bottom-up priming account, and the results showed that the disruptive effects disappeared when the cue was merely perceptually identified without working memory processing. This suggests that the disruptive effects were due specifically to the mechanism of top-down modulation during working memory maintenance. In Experiment 3, the interference effects persisted in the condition where the search stimuli were presented so briefly that any eye movements to the irrelevant distractor can be precluded before completion of the search task. These findings suggest that the presence of an irrelevant distractor matching working memory contents has distracted attention from focusing on the task. Because the memory-matching distractor was entirely irrelevant to the current tasks, the present results provide strong evidence for automatic guidance of attention from the contents of working memory.

Key words: working memory, attentional capture, distractor interference, visual search

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