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Strategic inhibition of distractors with visual working memory contents after involuntary attention capture

Previous research has suggested that visual working memory (VWM) contents had a guiding effect on selective attention, and once participants realized that the distractors shared the same information with VWM contents in the search task, they would strategically inhibit the potential distractors with...

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Autores principales: Lu, Jiachen, Tian, Lili, Zhang, Jiafeng, Wang, Jing, Ye, Chaoxiong, Liu, Qiang
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5701221/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29176675
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-16305-5
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author Lu, Jiachen
Tian, Lili
Zhang, Jiafeng
Wang, Jing
Ye, Chaoxiong
Liu, Qiang
author_facet Lu, Jiachen
Tian, Lili
Zhang, Jiafeng
Wang, Jing
Ye, Chaoxiong
Liu, Qiang
author_sort Lu, Jiachen
collection PubMed
description Previous research has suggested that visual working memory (VWM) contents had a guiding effect on selective attention, and once participants realized that the distractors shared the same information with VWM contents in the search task, they would strategically inhibit the potential distractors with VWM contents. However, previous behavioral studies could not reveal the way how distractors with VWM contents are inhibited strategically. By employing the eye-tracking technique and a dual-task paradigm, we manipulated the probability of memory items occurring as distractors to explore this issue. Consistent with previous behavioral studies, the results showed that the inhibitory effect occurred only in the high-probability condition, while the guiding effect emerged in the low-probability condition. More importantly, the eye-movement results indicated that in the high-probability condition, once few (even one) distractors with VWM contents were captured at first, all the remaining distractors with VWM contents would be rejected as a whole. However, in the low-probability condition, attention could be captured by the majority of distractors with VWM contents. These results suggested that the guiding effect of VWM contents on attention is involuntary in the early stage of visual search. After the completion of this involuntary stage, the guiding effect of task-irrelevant VWM contents on attention could be strategically controlled.
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spelling pubmed-57012212017-11-30 Strategic inhibition of distractors with visual working memory contents after involuntary attention capture Lu, Jiachen Tian, Lili Zhang, Jiafeng Wang, Jing Ye, Chaoxiong Liu, Qiang Sci Rep Article Previous research has suggested that visual working memory (VWM) contents had a guiding effect on selective attention, and once participants realized that the distractors shared the same information with VWM contents in the search task, they would strategically inhibit the potential distractors with VWM contents. However, previous behavioral studies could not reveal the way how distractors with VWM contents are inhibited strategically. By employing the eye-tracking technique and a dual-task paradigm, we manipulated the probability of memory items occurring as distractors to explore this issue. Consistent with previous behavioral studies, the results showed that the inhibitory effect occurred only in the high-probability condition, while the guiding effect emerged in the low-probability condition. More importantly, the eye-movement results indicated that in the high-probability condition, once few (even one) distractors with VWM contents were captured at first, all the remaining distractors with VWM contents would be rejected as a whole. However, in the low-probability condition, attention could be captured by the majority of distractors with VWM contents. These results suggested that the guiding effect of VWM contents on attention is involuntary in the early stage of visual search. After the completion of this involuntary stage, the guiding effect of task-irrelevant VWM contents on attention could be strategically controlled. Nature Publishing Group UK 2017-11-24 /pmc/articles/PMC5701221/ /pubmed/29176675 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-16305-5 Text en © The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
Lu, Jiachen
Tian, Lili
Zhang, Jiafeng
Wang, Jing
Ye, Chaoxiong
Liu, Qiang
Strategic inhibition of distractors with visual working memory contents after involuntary attention capture
title Strategic inhibition of distractors with visual working memory contents after involuntary attention capture
title_full Strategic inhibition of distractors with visual working memory contents after involuntary attention capture
title_fullStr Strategic inhibition of distractors with visual working memory contents after involuntary attention capture
title_full_unstemmed Strategic inhibition of distractors with visual working memory contents after involuntary attention capture
title_short Strategic inhibition of distractors with visual working memory contents after involuntary attention capture
title_sort strategic inhibition of distractors with visual working memory contents after involuntary attention capture
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5701221/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29176675
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-16305-5
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