Out with the old: New target templates impair the guidance of visual search by preexisting task goals.

Berggren, Nick; Nako, Rebecca; Eimer, Martin · 2020 · Crossref

DOI: 10.1037/xge0000697

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Summary

This study investigates how visual search is guided when multiple attentional templates are active simultaneously, specifically examining the competition between long-term (sustained) and short-term (transient) search goals. While previous research established that observers can maintain multiple target templates concurrently, it remained unclear how these templates interact when one remains constant over time and another changes trial-by-trial. The authors aimed to determine whether sustained templates, potentially stored in long-term memory, or transient templates, held in working memory, dominate attentional guidance, and whether the activation of new goals impairs pre-existing ones. The researchers conducted three experiments using a two-color visual search task where participants identified target bars among distractors. In Experiment 1, participants performed blocked tasks with either constant (sustained) or changing (transient) target colors, as well as a "mixed" task where one color remained constant while the other changed every trial. Electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded to measure the N2pc component, an electrophysiological marker of attentional selection, alongside reaction times (RTs). Experiments 2 and 3 manipulated the duration of the sustained template to determine how quickly interference effects emerged, testing whether costs arise from transferring templates to long-term memory or from the encoding of new templates into working memory. Results from Experiment 1 revealed that in blocked tasks, RTs were faster for sustained templates, but N2pc components showed no difference, suggesting behavioral costs occurred after initial attentional selection. However, in the mixed task, a significant "sustained-template cost" emerged: RTs were slower, and N2pc components were smaller and delayed for targets matching the sustained color compared to those matching the transient color. This indicated that the guidance of attention by the pre-existing sustained template was impaired when paired with a newly activated transient template. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that this interference effect emerged rapidly, within two trials of establishing a new constant color template. These findings suggest that the activation of a new top-down search goal impairs the ability of a pre-existing template to guide attention, representing a form of retroactive interference in visual search control. The rapid onset of this cost implies that the encoding of new transient templates into working memory interferes with the retrieval or maintenance of sustained templates, regardless of whether the sustained template has been transferred to long-term memory. This work clarifies that multiple templates do not operate independently; rather, short-term goals can disrupt longer-term attentional biases, with implications for understanding how transient task sets interact with stable motivational or affective attentional biases.

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• visual search