The role of working memory in visual attention

Abstract

Working memory (WM) plays a crucial role in the guidance of visual attention. However, findings from past studies of the WM effect on visual attention are quite controversial. Some studies claimed that the presence of such an effect is automatic, i.e. attention is driven to stimuli related to the working memory representation, independent of the relevance to any explicit task goal. In contrast, some other studies provided evidence that such WM effects are not so automatic or rigid. The present study aims to investigate the controversy over memory-driven effects in visual selective attention. We found that an automatic WM effect may not be present in some visual search tasks using consistent mapping (search target remains unchanged between trials) and high energy stimuli. Furthermore, with modifications of the experimental setup that has previously been used to support positive findings of the automatic WM effect, we report some strategic uses of the WM item to speed up visual search. Therefore, our experiments support an alternative view that an automatic WM effect may be an outcome of incongruence of concurrent processing between a WM item and a non-target stimulus in the search set.