Attentional Guidance from Multiple Working Memory Representations: Evidence from Eye Movements

Zhang, Bao; Liu, Shuhui; Doro, Mattia; Galfano, Giovanni · 2018 · Crossref

DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-32144-4

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Summary

This study investigates whether multiple representations held in visual working memory (VWM) can simultaneously guide visual attention, specifically addressing the controversy surrounding "accessory" (non-prioritized) items. While it is established that a prioritized VWM template biases attention, previous findings on whether accessory items exert similar guidance have been mixed. Some research supports the "single-item-template hypothesis," suggesting only the prioritized item guides attention, while others support the "multiple-item-template hypothesis," arguing that all maintained items influence attention. The authors hypothesized that discrepancies in prior literature stemmed from the use of less sensitive visual search tasks and reliance on manual reaction times (RTs), which are susceptible to cognitive control. To resolve this, the study employed a tilted-line visual search task requiring focal attention and utilized eye-tracking to measure first fixation proportions (FFPs), providing a more direct measure of early attentional deployment. The research comprised two experiments where participants maintained two colored shapes in VWM. A retrieval cue prioritized one item, leaving the other in an accessory status. During a subsequent visual search task, distractors either matched the prioritized item, the accessory item, or neither. Experiment 1 used a standard procedure with predictable timing. Results showed that while manual RTs indicated guidance only from the prioritized item, FFPs revealed significant attentional capture by both the prioritized and accessory representations. Experiment 2 employed a more robust design to control for strategic factors, such as temporal expectancy and verbal recoding, by unpredictably alternating between search and memory test trials and using a color wheel memory task. In Experiment 2, both manual RTs and FFPs demonstrated significant attentional guidance from the accessory representation, although the magnitude of this effect remained smaller than that of the prioritized representation. The findings provide strong evidence for the multiple-item-template hypothesis, demonstrating that accessory VWM representations can indeed guide visual attention. The study highlights that manual RTs may underestimate this effect due to strategic suppression or cognitive control, whereas oculomotor measures like FFPs offer a more sensitive index of involuntary attentional bias. The results suggest that when multiple items are held in VWM, they do not compete for exclusive attentional guidance; rather, they simultaneously interact with the visual system, with prioritized items exerting a stronger influence than accessory ones. This clarifies previous conflicting literature by attributing the lack of observed guidance for accessory items in some studies to methodological limitations rather than an absence of the underlying cognitive mechanism.

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• attention allocation