Object feature reinstatement into working-memory? Separating the direct and indirect effects of long-term memory on attentional selection

ABSTRACT

During visual search, observers adopt an attentional template that guides attention towards stimuli with features that match the search-for object. This template can be bolstered by prior knowledge, even when that knowledge is irrelevant. Here, we examined how such prior knowledge in long-term memory (LTM) biases visual search both directly from a LTM-based template, and indirectly after being reinstated into a visual working memory (VWM) template. Across experiments, participants used LTM to learn a set of object images with specific colours, and then searched for the objects in any colour amongst new or old distractors. We found that for VWM-based templates, search was significantly affected by the previously learned colour association. In contrast, when search is guided directly by LTM, the effects on search time are likely related to a post-perceptual process. Altogether, this work clarifies the interactive roles of VWM and LTM in controlling attentional capture during visual search.

KEYWORDS:

• Attentional capture
• attentional templates
• long-term memory
• visual working memory
• object-feature reinstatement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Thank you to Dr. Kerzel for providing the MATLAB source code which allowed us to create the four colour variations for the stimuli in all the experiments.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part an NSERC Discovery Grant (418507-2012) and CFI Grant (30374) to N.A.