Quantifying the attentional impact of working memory matching targets and distractors

ABSTRACT

Various theoretical proposals have been put forward to explain how memory representations control attention during visual search. In this study, we use the first saccade on each trial as a way to quantify the attentional impact of multiple types of representations held in working memory. Across two experiments, we found that a search target maintained in working memory was attended over 20 times more frequently than a non-memory-matching distractor. In addition, an item matching an additional object represented in working memory was attended 2 times more frequently than a non-memory matching distractor. These findings show that there is a measurable attentional impact of items maintained in working memory for a future task, however, such representations have a much weaker attentional impact than working memory representations of search targets.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual attention
• visual search
• eye tracking
• working memory

Acknowledgments

We thank Gordon Logan, Meg Saylor, and Adrienne Seiffert for their comments on this research as partial fulfilment of Dr. Carlisle’s dissertation. We would also like to thank Joy Geng & Steve Luck for helpful discussion of the work and Julianna Ianni for assistance with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grants from the National Eye Institute [grant numbers R01-EY019882, P30-EY008126, T32-EY007135] and the National Science Foundation [grant number BCS 09-57072].