Stressing the mind: The effect of cognitive load and articulatory suppression on attentional guidance from working memory

Soto, David; Humphreys, G. W. · 2008 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.3758/pp.70.5.924

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Summary

This study investigates how cognitive load and articulatory suppression influence the top-down guidance of visual attention by working memory (WM). Previous research demonstrated that items held in WM can automatically bias attention toward matching stimuli in a visual search display, even when those stimuli are distractors. However, findings have been inconsistent, with some studies failing to replicate these effects. The authors hypothesized that discrepancies arise from differences in WM load, the use of articulatory suppression, and the time interval between memory encoding and search. To resolve this, four experiments examined the temporal course and magnitude of WM-guided attention under varying cognitive demands. Participants performed a visual search task where they identified the orientation of a target line embedded within colored shapes. On invalid trials, a distractor shape matched an item held in WM; on neutral trials, no match occurred. Experiment 1 varied the inter-stimulus interval (ISI) between the memory item and the search display (188, 504, or 1,008 msec) to test if WM effects were transient. Results showed that WM guidance slowed search performance on invalid trials regardless of ISI or target saliency, indicating that the effect persists beyond initial memory consolidation. Experiment 2 introduced articulatory suppression (repeating numbers aloud) to prevent phonological recoding. This manipulation significantly altered the time course of WM effects: guidance was negligible at short and medium ISIs but emerged strongly at the longest ISI, suggesting that suppression delays or reduces the availability of WM representations for attentional guidance. Experiment 3 increased WM load by requiring participants to hold two items instead of one. Contrary to expectations that higher load would diminish guidance, the effect of WM on search remained robust and did not significantly differ from the single-item condition. Experiment 4 combined high WM load with articulatory suppression. The results indicated that while articulatory suppression generally reduced the immediacy of WM guidance, the specific interaction between load and suppression was complex, with the primary finding being that resource competition in WM is a critical determinant of attentional bias. The study concludes that the interaction between WM and visual selection is not static but depends on the degree of resource competition and the encoding format of memory items. Articulatory suppression disrupts the rapid deployment of attention from WM, likely by interfering with phonological recoding or consuming executive resources. However, increasing WM load alone does not eliminate attentional guidance. These findings clarify previous inconsistencies in the literature, demonstrating that WM contents can guide attention even under high cognitive load, provided that the memory representations are sufficiently maintained and accessible. This supports models where WM actively biases early visual processing, with the strength and timing of this bias modulated by concurrent cognitive tasks.

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• visual search