Time course of attentional guidance by visual and verbal working memory representations

ABSTRACT

Visual and verbal representations in working memory guide visual attention to a memory-matching item. It is well documented that visual cues have an advantage in target detection over verbal cues; however, little research has explored the differences in visual search processes and between attentional guidance by visual and verbal working memory. To address this issue, here we investigated the time course of attentional guidance through visual and verbal representations by comparing the inhibition of return effects. Previous research shows that both types of working memory items produce early facilitation effects and later inhibition effects, but there are lesser facilitation effects for verbal than for visual working memory guidance of attention. Results showed that in all conditions, attention was guided by memory representations, but no inhibition of return was observed. Thus, the robustness of previous findings on the time course of attentional guidance by working memory is low.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual working memory
• verbal working memory
• attention
• inhibition of return

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Naoko Masuda for supporting data collection. The authors would like to thank Enago (www.enago.jp) for the English language review. The manuscript was drafted using DeepL Write and OpenAI ChatGPT. The AI generated text was read, revised and proofed by the authors.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

All raw data are available on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/pv9rm/.

Notes

1 To avoid possible confusion, we used another typical colour green instead of purple (RGB: 255, 0, 255) used in Cui et al. (2021) because this colour is not called as “purple” in Japanese but rather called as “magenta”, mixed colour red and purple.

2 The distance from the colour square to the fixation point was determined through personal communication (H. Gao, personal communication, 28 August 2021).

Additional information

Funding

The research was supported by JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists [grant numbers JP20K14274 and JP23K17171] to To.K. and by JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Encouragement of Scientists [grant numbers JP21H03888 and JP22H04021] to Ta.K.