DOI:10.6129/CJP.202109_63(3).0002
Chinese Journal of Psychology 2021, Vol.63, No.3, 249-264
You must Remember the Whole for the Reappearance of A Part to Capture Your Attention
Chun-Yu Kuo（Department of Adult & Continuing Education, National Taiwan Normal University；Department of Psychology, National Taiwan Normal University）
Abstract
When an external stimulus refreshes an internal representation maintained in a person’s working memory, it captures his or her attention. This working memory-based attentional capture has been demonstrated in various contexts using different stimuli. However, few studies have investigated this phenomenon using part of a visual display maintained in working memory to capture attention. In four experiments, I addressed this issue using a dual-task paradigm. The participants remembered the spatial locations of four colored disks for later recognition, judged the direction of a moving stimulus along with a static distractor, and recognized whether a probe display matched the memorized locations. Color was irrelevant to both the memory and attention tasks. In the valid condition, the color of the moving target was identical to the previously displayed color, and in the invalid condition, the color of the static distractor was the same as the previously displayed color. In Experiments 1 and 2, four white disks were used in a recognition task to probe the to-be-remembered locations. In Experiment 3, four white hexagon stars were used in a recognition task to probe the locations. In Experiment 4, a solid line showed the contour of the four locations for the recognition task. Colored disks were used as stimuli in the motion task for Experiments 1 and 4, whereas colored crosses were used in Experiment 2. Experiment 3 combined the design of Experiments 1 and 2 as a within-subject design. The results showed working memory-driven attentional capture only in Experiment 1 and an object-matched condition in Experiment 3, with two colored disks presented in the motion judgment task and four white disks probed for location memory. The contrast in the results across the three experiments suggests that the parts must be an important aspect of the memorized representation for its reappearance to capture a person’s attention. When the judgment required comparison with the memorized representation based on the four disks, the spatial locations of the four disks were crucial for accurate decision making. Thus, the reappearance of one colored disk could capture attention, whereas the appearance of a cross in the same color could not. When the spatial configuration of the four disks was emphasized in the memorized representation (Experiment 4), the reappearance of the same part did not capture attention.
Keywords: attentional capture, memory strategy, working memory
