Exploring the contributions of spatial and non-spatial working memory to priming of pop-out

Ahn, JeeWon; Patel, Trisha N.; Buetti, Simona; Lleras, Alejandro · 2017 · Crossref

DOI: 10.3758/s13414-017-1285-x

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Summary

This study investigates the cognitive mechanisms underlying priming of pop-out (PoP), a phenomenon where visual search performance is facilitated when a target-defining feature repeats across consecutive trials. Previous research by Lee et al. (2009) suggested that PoP is driven by feature gain modulation rather than visual working memory (VWM), based on findings that non-spatial VWM loads did not interfere with PoP. However, this conclusion relied solely on non-spatial memory tasks, leaving open the possibility that spatial VWM might play a role. The current research addresses this gap by examining whether spatial VWM loads interfere with PoP, thereby testing the hypothesis that PoP involves memory representations stored in spatial VWM. The authors conducted two experiments using a dual-task paradigm. In Experiment 1A, participants performed a color-oddball search task while maintaining four colored patches in non-spatial VWM. In Experiment 1B, the VWM task was altered to require remembering the locations of two white dots, thereby loading spatial VWM. In both experiments, participants reported the shape of the color-oddball target. The key manipulation was whether the target color repeated or switched from the previous trial. The study utilized within-subjects designs to compare single-task conditions against dual-task conditions, measuring response times (RTs) and accuracy to determine the magnitude of PoP under varying memory loads. The results replicated the finding that non-spatial VWM load did not significantly affect the magnitude of PoP; the facilitation from target repetition remained consistent regardless of the concurrent non-spatial memory task. In contrast, Experiment 1B demonstrated that spatial VWM load significantly reduced the magnitude of PoP. Specifically, the difference in RTs between repeat and switch trials was smaller in the dual-task condition compared to the single-task condition. This interference was observed across both fast and slow response trials, indicating a robust effect. Furthermore, Experiment 2 extended these findings by showing that increasing the spatial VWM load decreased PoP in a dose-dependent manner, while changes in non-spatial load had no such effect. These findings challenge the feature gain modulation account of PoP, which posits that the effect is purely bottom-up and independent of memory resources. Instead, the results support a multilevel process theory, suggesting that PoP relies on VWM representations, specifically those involving spatial attention. The study concludes that spatial VWM is integral to the deployment of attention during visual search, and that loading this system interferes with the implicit memory traces that facilitate PoP. This distinction between spatial and non-spatial VWM contributions provides a more nuanced understanding of how past experiences guide visual attention.

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• visual search