The role of working memory in attentional capture

Lavie, Nilli; Fockert, Jan de

doi:10.3758/bf03196756

Cited by 298 publications

(317 citation statements)

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“…The results also showed an interaction, which is in line with findings from previous studies that have shown that congruency effects increase when memory constraints are added (Lavie & de Fockert, 2005;Lavie, Hirst, de Fockert, & Viding, 2004).…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 82%

White bear everywhere: Exploring the boundaries of the attentional white bear phenomenon

Lahav

Makovski

Tsal

2012

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Some failures of selective attention may be explained by the attentional white bear (AWB) phenomenon Tsal & Makovski (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 32: [351][352][353][354][355][356][357][358][359][360][361][362][363] 2006), which indicates that prior knowledge of a distractor location causes attention to be actively allocated to it. The AWB effect is demonstrated in a task that includes infrequent trials that involve two simultaneous dots embedded among flanker trials. The dot positioned at an expected distractor location is perceived as appearing before the dot at an expected empty location, indicating that attentional resources have initially been allocated to the expected distractor locations. The main goal of this study was to explore the boundaries of the AWB phenomenon by imposing perceptual, memory, and sensory constraints on the flanker task. The results showed that the AWB effect was obtained even when additional constraints severely taxed the information-processing system. We propose that a mandatory mechanism guides a fixed minimal amount of attention to expected distractor locations in a topdown manner.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 82%

White bear everywhere: Exploring the boundaries of the attentional white bear phenomenon

Lahav

Makovski

Tsal

2012

Atten Percept Psychophys

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“…Firstly, they demonstrate for the first time that increasing WM load can increase distractor effects in hierarchical stimuli in certain conditions. Similar to previous findings from selectiveattention tasks in which the target and distractor items constituted different stimuli (e.g., Lavie et al, 2004, Lavie & de Fockert, 2005 and also when relevant and irrelevant information constituted distinct stimuli that were spatially overlapping (e.g., de Fockert et al, 2001), we found that WM load increased interference effects from the irrelevant global level when attending to local-level information in Experiments 1 and 3. The second, and more important, novel finding was that such an increase in distractibility as a function of WM load may be restricted to situations of local processing (e.g., Lavie et al, 2004).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 79%

“…This effect replicates similar findings from selective attention tasks in which the target and distractor items were different stimuli (e.g., Lavie & de Fockert, 2005;Lavie et al, 2004) and also when the relevant and irrelevant information constituted distinct stimuli that were nonetheless spatially overlapping (e.g., de Fockert et al, 2001). These results demonstrate for the first time that increasing WM load increases distractor effects from the irrelevant global level when attending to local elements in hierarchical stimuli.…”

Section: Discussion: Experiments 1 Andsupporting

confidence: 73%

“…For example, attentional capture from peripheral singletons is greater when the task requirements solicit diffuse rather than focused attention (Belopolsky & Theeuwes, 2010;Belopolsky, Zwaan, Theeuwes, & Kramer, 2007; for data slightly incompatible with this explanation, see also Santangelo, Botta, Lupiáñez, & Spence, 2011). Moreover attentional capture from irrelevant colour singletons is greater when the concurrent WM load is high (vs. low; Lavie & de Fockert, 2005). Such a finding may be explained in terms of a greater spatial dispersion of attention under high WM load, leading to a greater tendency for singletons to capture attention.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 54%

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Working memory load can both improve and impair selective attention: Evidence from the Navon paradigm

Ahmed

Fockert

2012

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Selective attention to relevant targets has been shown to depend on the availability of working memory (WM). Under conditions of high WM load, processing of irrelevant distractors is enhanced. Here we showed that this detrimental effect of WM load on selective attention efficiency is reversed when the task requires global-rather than locallevel processing. Participants were asked to attend to either the local or the global level of a hierarchical Navon stimulus while keeping either a low or a high load in WM. In line with previous findings, during attention to the local level, distractors at the global level produced more interference under high than under low WM load. By contrast, loading WM had the opposite effect of improving selective attention during attention to the global level. The findings demonstrate that the impact of WM load on selective attention is not invariant, but rather is dependent on the level of the to-be-attended information. Keywords Selective attention . Working memory . Cognitive and attentional controlIt is well established that the availability of cognitive resources affects the efficiency of visual selective attention. Previous research has demonstrated that temporarily limiting the availability of cognitive resources by imposing concurrent external load (e.g., Lavie, Hirst, de Fockert, & Viding, 2004) impedes the success with which the distracting influence of irrelevant information is overcome. As a result, interference effects from irrelevant distractors are greater when working memory (WM) load is high (as compared to low).Typically, this detrimental influence of cognitive load on the ability to prevent distraction has been shown in tasks requiring selective attention to local information and the avoidance of peripheral irrelevant information. For example, Lavie et al. (2004) found that the distracting influence of a peripheral irrelevant letter, when attending to a centrally presented target letter, is greater when WM load is high than when it is low (see also de Fockert & Wu, 2009). However, visual information often comprises local-level information that is subsumed within a larger holistic pattern, such as a face or scene. Whilst the impact of WM load on locally attended selection is well established, the impact of WM load on the capacity to selectively attend to information at a more global level, whilst ignoring local-level information, is not known. Here we used hierarchical Navon-type stimuli (Navon, 1977) to investigate the impact of WM load on selective attention to different levels of the same stimulus.Hierarchical stimuli consist of a large global shape made up of smaller local shapes. When attention is directed to one of the levels, the degree to which relevant information is successfully attended to is quantified by the performance difference (congruency effect) between trials when the information at the unattended level is the same as (congruent trials) or different from (incongruent trials) the attended information. Measuring congruency effects as a functio...

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“…This suggests that the strain of maintaining information in WM while performing an unrelated task reduces cognitive control, allowing the distracting stimulus to exert more influence on behaviour. Indeed, a body of research has demonstrated the effect of WM load in cognitive control; here we demonstrate this effect with a slight increase in WM load of only 1 item, in contrast with previous work using much more strenuous cognitive loads (de Fockert et al, 2001;Kelley and Lavie, 2011;Lavie and De Fockert, 2005;Lavie et al, 2004). The present results further indicate that this general WM load effect may come about through a reduction in coordinated activity within the goal-oriented dorsal network.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 56%

Functional connectivity between ventral and dorsal frontoparietal networks underlies stimulus-driven and working memory-driven sources of visual distraction

Greene

Soto

2014

NeuroImage

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Publication informationNeurolmage, 84 (2014): 290-298Publisher Elsevier Item record/more information http://hdl.handle.net/10197/6144 Publisher's statementThis is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in Neurolmage. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Neurolmage (VOL 84, ISSUE 2014, (2014

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The role of working memory in attentional capture

Cited by 298 publications

References 16 publications

White bear everywhere: Exploring the boundaries of the attentional white bear phenomenon

White bear everywhere: Exploring the boundaries of the attentional white bear phenomenon

Working memory load can both improve and impair selective attention: Evidence from the Navon paradigm

Functional connectivity between ventral and dorsal frontoparietal networks underlies stimulus-driven and working memory-driven sources of visual distraction

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